Red Hat Services Journey: Automation Adoption

Organizations adopt automation to eliminate the time and errors associated with manual configuration processes. The promise of enterprise-wide IT and business automation is appealing, but without well-defined tooling and streamlined processes, benefits are quickly eroded by constant change and lack of clarity. A successful automation strategy with predictable workflows and rich auditability requires accountability, governance, security, and standards from the onset.

Automation is attractive because it provides scalability and agility, accelerating outcomes with consistent and repeatable processes that support the evolution of DevOps culture. According to IDC, organizations unable to add personnel but needing to keep up with increasing operational complexity will need to rely on system management software, including automation. However, getting an entire organization to adopt automation is complex. Businesses need a sustainable automation strategy and must create modern IT with new approaches to process and collaboration.

Red Hat® Services Journey: Automation Adoption provides a framework for managing an organization-wide automation adoption journey. Red Hat Consulting will work with you on all stages of automation adoption from introducing technology to aligning teams on standard practices to orchestrating powerful workflows that fit with your evolving business objectives.

Figure 1. Stages of automation adoption.

During an automation adoption journey, Red Hat Consulting experts help customers define a unified strategy focused on their unique business needs. Consultants then introduce and scale technology, process, and culture to support business with automation. Our experts will guide you across the phases shown in Figure 1.

Discuss goals, solution approaches, and next steps to:

• Identify use cases, challenges, and potential issues. 
• Identify viable approaches and technologies, necessary participants, and desired outcomes.
• Outline current state, target state, opportunities for change, and operational benefits.

Develop an overarching plan that delivers:

• Analysis of current-state automation approaches.
• Organizational practices for the program.
• Strategy across people, processes, and technologies.
• Architecture definition that addresses target environments.

Work alongside Red Hat subject matter experts, who will help your team:

• Build a collaborative culture, determine responsibilities, foster new skills, and accelerate innovation.
• Adapt existing processes and tooling to realize the full benefits of automation.
• Deliver security-focused, flexible infrastructure and practices to automate and orchestrate efficient workflows that support business strategy.

Expand, promote, and optimize adoption through:

• Process evolution and toolset integration to increase efficiency.
• Reusing consumable automation from previous increments.
• Using internal sponsors and community support models to socialize techniques.
• Methodology and application governance to promote sustainable growth.

Red Hat Consulting helps customers evolve capabilities in four critical areas. These areas comprise a strong, flexible framework for growing automation within teams, across organizations, and in support of changing business requirements. 

• Standardization of content, systems, and security practices
• Task automation to deliver repeatable and scalable results quickly
• Workflow orchestration to integrate disparate tasks and management systems for end-to-end process automation
• Process transformation to realign approach to self-service catalogs and business-aligned workflows 

Working directly with Red Hat engineering and support, Red Hat Consulting teams bring advanced skills to deliver solutions using Red Hat products and open standards. With exclusive insight into upcoming features and product roadmaps, Red Hat is better positioned to align teams, streamline processes, and help enterprise systems and applications work together using open source and proprietary technologies.

Straight from the source: Red Hat Consulting teams communicate directly with Red Hat support and product development organizations. Many of our consultants are also active contributors to the upstream open source communities behind Red Hat technologies, so they bring unparalleled expertise. 

Diverse technical experience: Red Hat Consulting maintains deep knowledge of open source and proprietary systems and application platforms. Our comprehensive understanding of the technology market helps us provide clients with a complete view of their environment. Our guidance is based on a holistic understanding of building enterprise systems, not just our own products.

Mentor-based approach: Red Hat Consulting gives clients the information and skills they need to move to Red Hat solutions safely and efficiently. Red Hat believes knowledge must be open and shared, just like source code.

Real-world training: Red Hat Training and Certification develops role-based knowledge. Through hands-on training in emerging and foundational open source technologies, you can build real-world skills that support critical commoditization and transformation projects alike. 

• Collaborative innovation
• Market-based best practices
• IT modernization and optimization
• Excellent return on investment and economy of investment
• Agile implementation
• DevOps methodology
• Risk management
• Integration of different software
• Highly qualified experts

Talk with a Red Hat consultant to learn more about automating your enterprise.