Automation for the masses

While we all worry about why job wages haven't increased, we seem to have more and more to do in our jobs. The increasing demands of productivity from our job means we need to find better ways to do tasks at hand, whether it is design, test, analysis, or whatever our task is called. In the service delivery world, it's about getting our service built, tested and released to our customers whether internal or external. The constant pressure to innovate and build upon previous successes with new features and expanded capability driven by our technology consumers causes large amounts of stress in ourselves and our organizations threatening their very being.

Taking a step back, we must figure out how to do a more quantum leap (geometric growth) rather than linear growth in our ability to do the tasks at hand. There are only a couple of ways to do this. One, buy new tools that offer the leap in technology or two, speed up the existing procedures within our tasks. While buying new tools is fun and exciting, perhaps the more over looked method of speeding up existing tasks could be the real key to leverage the geometric advantage.

Automation applied to our tasks is often cited as the path to speed up tasks, but automation typically comes at a price because of the complexity of automation tools. However a new breed of tools such as CloudShell from QualiSystems, Ansible and others, have expanded the automation world so that non-programmers can author automation and make the leap to much higher productivity.

I suspect in the near future we will see an ever expanding automation user world and even more new automation tools will be available to leverage the geometric growth demands in our workplaces.