5 Steps to Enterprise-Wide Automation

Featured article by Brad Paubel,Vice President of Internal Customer Technologies, Maritz

For many years, IT has been a gatekeeper. When anyone wanted new server capacity, additional storage, a password reset, or a new application deployed, they had to come to IT to get the job done. The processes and friction IT put in place to manage the demand led to IT being seen as a barrier, rather than as a business enabler. IT was not focusing on the experience, the perception but only on the technology. In recent years, things have started to change. For instance, the public cloud has made it relatively easy for end users to provision their own computing capacity on demand, and outsourcing has created profound competition for internal IT departments.

Embrace Change

At Maritz, we recognized this trend early on. We knew that a purely technology-oriented approach to IT was not the way forward. IT could no longer be a monopoly – or worse, a dictatorship. We wanted our business to work with IT because they saw value, not because they had to. IT needed to become a customer-centric organization that sold the value of the services it delivered, competing on equal terms with alternatives.

To drive this transformation, the first step we took was to give our lines of business the freedom to procure IT services from wherever they saw the most value. This ensured that our IT team had to be the best choice, rather than the only one. We then set about transforming the way that our IT team worked focusing on the culture.

Use Automation to Free Capacity

However, we faced a fundamental challenge. Our people were already loaded to the maximum, so unless we could free up bandwidth to become a truly “sales-oriented” organization, we wouldn’t be able to change. We looked at a number of different ways of doing this, and quickly realized that the key was to automate the services we already delivered. This would make it much easier for our internal customers to request and receive these services – the first step in our transformation into a service-oriented organization. At the same time, this would release the capacity we needed to drive fundamental change.

By using service catalog and orchestration capabilities, we could start to deliver services at the much faster, with less friction and with a push of a button – and make those services truly self-serve. We continue to build momentum. Right now, we have over 100 additional services that we want to automate – and the list continues to grow.

Create a Customer-Focused Roadmap

We then set up a team to evaluate which services to tackle first. Our criteria were straightforward – we chose services that were important to our users and that could be easily automated. We put all our efforts into making these services a success, delivering our first automations within a number of weeks. Building on this initial achievement, we then broadened our roadmap into an enterprise-wide automation initiative.

Since we started out on this journey, we’ve automated a huge number of IT services, ranging from user account creation to server provisioning and desktop software deployment. This includes provisioning of public cloud services – by acting as a broker for these services and making them simpler, we’ve added significant value. We’ve also extended beyond pure IT services, automating and developing applications for our internal customers. Along the way, we’ve actually reduced our core IT operational costs freeing up resources to drive our journey forward.

Build a Partnership with the Business

Even more importantly, however, we’ve forged a completely new relationship with our internal clients. We’ve shifted from being an information technology organization to an information services organization. Due to this new relationship we are now able to provide value in a whole new way. We listen to our customers, partner with them and help them to solve real business problems. Our focus turned to the experience the perception and our value is aligned with our customer, we become that trusted advisor. We’re constantly selling/marketing the benefits of what we do internally, and the results have been gratifying. While our lines of business still have the freedom to find other suppliers, we’ve retained our internal customers.

We’ve also established a “citizen developer” program, where people in other departments are developing applications to enhance the services they receive. We work closely with our citizen developers, giving them the support they need to be successful. This has created further buy-in to our approach, creating a groundswell of enthusiasm and capabilities that continues to grow day by day. By empowering our end users, we’re giving them control over their own destiny – and they love it.

Become a Valued Consultant

We also continually receive feedback to measure people’s perceptions of IT. This doesn’t look at things such as response times, but instead how our customers view our value. We’ve seen the scores go up dramatically since we changed the way we do business, reflecting the strong partnership that we’re building with our customers. We know that they can go elsewhere for basic IT capabilities, so it’s incredibly important that we sell them on the advanced services and consultative approach we deliver – as well as our passion to help them succeed.

Looking forward, we believe that the dramatic innovation in the IT marketplace is only going to give us further opportunities to deliver value. Our goal is to become a trusted broker of a new explosion of consumerized IT services, acting as both advisors and enablers. We want our internal customers to constantly reach out to us when they see new technology, and to rely on us to help them make it a reality. We’re already on the road to this, and once this attitude is completely pervasive, we’ll know that we’ve arrived.

Brad Paubel is Vice President of Internal Customer Technologies at Maritz, one of America’s most trusted corporate event, travel and market research companies. Here, Brad talks about how Maritz used automation to transform its internal IT team from a traditional technology organization into a true business partner.