Getting started with IT automation—an executive view

Having returned from our N‑able Empower event in Las Vegas about a month ago from writing this, I was surprised at just how many attendees felt like they were not doing enough to automate their IT processes.

I spoke to several IT leaders, business owners, presidents, and other executives and all of them were looking to do more with automation—many were even still trying to get to grips with the concept from a business perspective and start out on their automation journey. 

So, I thought it would be helpful to set out the business case for IT leaders to invest in automation as well as some of the first steps you can take towards setting up an automation program in your MSP business. 

Why automate?

IT automation is becoming highly sought after by IT Leaders, and there are seven main reasons for adopting an automation strategy.

1. Increase profitability
   Automation increases profitability by reducing labor costs for manual work, increasing worker productivity, and boosting the overall speed and agility of the IT service provider. 
2. Improve efficiencies
   Automation lowers your operational costs by making the output of your IT processes repeatable and more efficient
3. Reduce the human factor
   Using Automation to ensure that outcomes are repeatable and effective reduces the need for human intervention.
4. Standardize your IT service delivery
   Automating portions of your service delivery increases your time-to-value, improves customer retention rates, and can boost your overall Net Promoter Score (NPS) scores with your customers.
5. Important but mundane stuff gets done
   Automation allows your technicians to focus their expertise on what matters the most instead of having their time taken up with mundane tasks that could be dealt with via Automation. 
6. Talent shortage
   Finding quality team members in a highly competitive market comes at a premium. Focusing on Automation allows you to spend your corporate dollar on more important things.
7. Deliver better quality of services to your customers
   While I have listed this last, it is probably the most important. Providing the best IT services to your customers, both quickly and effectively, increases your operational maturity and allows you to deliver the quality of services your customer expects.

Putting your IT Automation plans together

The improved efficiencies provided by Automation can help you deliver results and accelerate your business toward its strategic goals. 

A recent survey conducted by Gatepoint Research, on behalf of Resolve, found that 45% of IT leaders already consider automation a core of their IT operations, and that 78% have automation and efficiency earmarked as one of their highest priorities for 2023. So, it’s a big trend in our sector.

This means that having a solid automation strategy is fundamental to making a difference in your IT Business. The first step in developing that strategy is to listen those who do the labor: your employees.

They will know exactly what mundane processes can be automated or which customers are costing you more time than others. Often this will enlighten your leadership team to the current state of your operational maturity so you can understand where you are least efficient, which is often the best place to begin with Automation.

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The three-step process to building an Automation Strategy

 Once you’ve done that, this is how I advise MSP partners and Internal IT Teams to move their Automation plans forward.

 Step 1:

MSPs: What manual or mundane tasks do you want to automate?
IT departments: What is your team spending most of their time on?

Building an Automation Strategy takes some planning and fact finding, but being able to start is usually the hardest part. When I talk with MSPs, I recommend they start with the mundane or boring stuff they don’t like doing. This usually yields a quick turnaround for your techs, keeps them interested as it affects them, and allows them to quickly get rid of tasks they don’t like doing. The same applies to internal IT departments.

Step 2:

MSPs: Look to your PSA or ITSM to find out what is creating the most tickets or repeat issues
IT departments: Problem management; deep dive into common issues or Root Cause Analysis

When I train technicians on starting out in Automation, whether it is coding in PowerShell or using N‑able N‑central’s built-in no-code Automation builder for IT Technicians, I always let them know to look no further than their ticketing solution (ie. PSA/ITSM)—or whatever record of truth they use for customer issues and requests, or incidents generated from their N‑central RMM, or other IT systems.

This is your IT record of truth for all things problem-related. So, it’s where you want to start your problem management journey for IT Automation ideas. It will show you exactly what customers, systems, and users are impacting your IT operation and services delivery.

Step 3:

MSP: Focus on your onboarding
IT departments: End-user provisioning and self-service

This is where I see a slight split in emphasis between the MSP and IT department. While they both have similar requirements, the MSPs generally spend much more time in user provisioning and customer onboarding than an IT department. This is due to the nature of remotely managing Networks, endpoints, and users. However, an IT department also spends a considerable amount of time navigating complexity in user provisioning, so this is an excellent one to focus on as well.

Start with your onboarding check list and then identify what tasks can be automated through scripting, and which tasks have related processes that also need to be automated. 

Process automation is much more involved and often needs deeper scripting and web development knowledge than task-based automation, but both are equally as important when it comes to an onboarding process that includes automation.

If you want more ideas on where to start when it comes to automating your processes, here are four links to some additional resources that will help to get your started: 

• MSP automation—getting started and overcoming challenges (Blog)
• Why automation is key if you are looking to scale your business (Blog)
• 15 Things you can (and should) automate Boot Camp (Video)
• 15 MORE Things you can (and should) automate (Video)

Finding the right scripts

Once you have worked out where to start with IT automation, the next step is creating the scripts themselves. This is where N‑able comes in and why our partnership approach to working with IT departments and MSPs is key. Through our Automation Cookbook we offer all our MSP partners and internal IT customers access to more than 1000 automation and custom monitoring scripts, which have been developed by our own Head Nerds as well as lots of our partners. These can give you a major leg up when it comes to getting your Automation Strategy started. 

Automation is here to help overtaxed techs, so if you cannot find what you want there you could also consider incentivising your technicians to develop their own scripts—after all, nobody understands the challenges your business and your customers face better than the people that are dealing with them on a day-to-day basis. Some of the more common incentive ideas include: 

• Financial incentives 
• Offering time off or other compensation (time off, time in lieu, dinner, or a special outing)
• Making it part of their KPIs (key performance indicators)
• Internal contests with prizes

Hopefully, this will help you get started with your Automation journey. You’ll find even more advice and guidance on in the Automation section of our blog… just click here. 

If you’re an existing or prospective N‑able partner and you want more information on how to develop your automation strategy you can always reach out to me. That way we can know where you are at today with automation, and help you understand how to get progress effectively on your automation journey, and get your operation out of the stone ages.

Jason Murphy is the Head Nerd for Efficiency, Automation and Community at N‑able
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