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Special Issue--IT Automation: Best Practices: Page 12 of 14

The Result

Ideally, automating parts of the IT infrastructure will free your staff to develop higher level services deserving of their time and expertise. It makes more sense to have a highly skilled IT staffer work on innovations than on change management. That's the idealistic view. It's also true that you may need fewer IT staffers. Not everyone will be up to the challenge of moving away from low skill functions.

It's also true, however, that there will always be parts of the business that cannot be fully automated. You'll still need your experts to be around when problems fall out of the standard templates that your IT automation tools are handling.

Your quest to lower IT costs and the burden of the IT staff through automation will require you to address all these areas of concern to maximize the benefits and ROI. And it will be an ongoing process. Just as we are never really done automating the business operations of our companies, it's also true that we'll never really be done finding new targets in IT operations to automate.