Recent McKinsey & Company research underscores this challenge in its “Enterprise IT Infrastructure Agenda for 2014” paper. As more business value migrates online and business processes become more digitized, IT infrastructure inevitably becomes a bigger source of business risk. “Even after years of consolidation and standardization, which have led to huge improvements in efficiency and reliability, most infrastructure leaders work in environments that they believe are too inflexible, provide too few capabilities to business partners, and require too much manual effort to support,” says McKinsey principal Bjorn Munstermann in the report. “Addressing these problems to create more scalable and flexible next-generation infrastructure will require sustained actions in multiple dimensions.”
Data centers, McKinsey & Company says, are a key focus of these risky, inflexible processes. In the drive to reduce risk and increase dependability, most data centers employ workflow automation solutions. Unfortunately, many IT organizations have an automation strategy that is fragile, unable to scale, and not built for change. To truly reduce risk through improved IT automation, managers must shift their thinking from an elemental “one-off” approach to something much more robust: the architectural approach.