How Outdated Automation Leads to More Manual Effort—and What You Can Do About It

IT departments are under pressure. They must ensure the technology that supports their organization is always on and secure. They must also roll out the right new tools to support successful digital business strategy. And they have to do all of this with limited amounts of money, time and skilled people.

Given this balancing act, the less manual effort required from IT staff, the better. IT pros should focus on innovation and increased value—not just maintaining the status quo.

This is where automation becomes a strategic advantage. If IT leaders automate repeatable, everyday business tasks wherever possible, then they have more time to drive digital transformation. However, analysts note that while workload automation and scheduling tools are the most frequently used tools for automation in business, the software that is currently in use is, on average, more than 20 years old. This creates some problems.

A Compound Complexity

The uncomfortable truth for many organizations is that outdated legacy scheduling and workload automation tools often limit the ability of IT departments to hand these tasks over to machines. Outdated scheduling tools can’t easily cross between different tools or platforms. As a result, they’re often used in isolation within a silo of a particular department, ERP, or line of business. This inevitably results in manual handoffs between isolated automated activities to keep things running smoothly.

Another consequence of this lack of connectivity between these tools is that the same manual tasks are carried out several times in different parts of the business. This duplication of manual effort makes systems and processes even more inefficient.

As the manual work increases, so does the likelihood of process errors and growing inconsistency. Not surprising when the sheer volume of repeated tasks needing human oversight leaves staff tired, frustrated and disengaged.

While this all keeps operations running, it builds up technical debt as more workarounds and fixes build up around complex activities. The whole situation means that less and less time remains to innovate and improve.

A Modern Solution

To stay ahead in the fast lane of digital transformation, organizations need modern workload automation and scheduling technology. They need a solution that gives IT teams the ability to provide business process automation across multiple platforms in hybrid environments—without manual handoffs. They need to be able to reuse process definitions across multiple instances and reduce duplication of effort and growing complexity that comes with outdated automation tools.

Organizations also need to be able to roll automation out wherever and whenever it’s needed, as simply as possible. Workload automation delivered through software-as-a-service (SaaS) provides this level of increased agility.

SaaS-based workload automation solutions reduce manual effort by breaking hardware and systems out of the constraints of on-premises IT. Companies that use this kind of modern process automation get considerable additional value through service. Updates, patches and maintenance are all done by the service provider and included in the subscription fee. This also means that it’s easy to scale with minimal manual effort.

Redwood’s RunMyJobs® solution is the only enterprise-level workload automation solution delivered through software-as-a-service. It can make a dramatic change in the way any IT team gets results. One organization that made the change to Redwood already saves nearly US$200,000 annually in on-premises data center costs and 60% in license costs from their previous workload automation and scheduling tool. It’s almost impossible to calculate the savings—and the strategic advantage—this organization achieved by freeing its IT leaders from countless manual tasks in the process.

Isn’t it time to recover your most valuable resources—your people—from filling in for outdated technology? Start today.

Find out more about RunMyJobs® and sign up for a free trial here.