Where to Begin

Where to Begin, Episode Summary

In this episode of the Automate IT podcast, host David Van Heerden discusses automation and where to begin. He emphasizes the importance of understanding automation and its purpose, which is to bring value to the business.

David explains the evolution of automation from digitizing manual processes to finding new ways of doing business. He suggests identifying automation opportunities by learning from the business and understanding its goals.

David also highlights the option of buying off-the-shelf automation solutions and the importance of integrating tools. He concludes by discussing the role of coding in automation and the potential impact of language models on scripting.

Read the Where to Begin transcript

All right, we're doing this. We're doing this. Roll the intro.

All right. Welcome to the Automate IT podcast. My name is David van Heerden. Uh, just a little background as to what I'm doing here. Uh, Automox is releasing a series of podcasts hosted by our collection of experts and guests, uh, all to help you get better at information technology, and we just wanted to start the conversation and share our knowledge. Uh, so hopefully you can share yours too in our community and maybe on this podcast as well, we'd love to hear from you.

And just a little bit more about myself, I've been working in IT for just over 11 years now. And in doing so, I've been in a wide range of industries. I've worked with a wide range of technology people and IT operators. And so I've seen and felt the pain that we go through. There are many industries that I haven't had personal experience in, but I've had the privilege of talking to experts in.

and learning a lot from them all the same. And one thing that I recognize is that common sense is not common. We need to share our experiences, thoughts, and ideas to really raise our level of what that common sense means. And so that's what I like to do. I like to share information. I like to say stupid stuff so that I get corrected and I can get a little bit better at it and be less dumb the next time I talk. So please stick around.

Catch me on anything that I say that sounds stupid and reach out and correct me on it. Because then I'd love to set the record straight on how to do our jobs better. Right. And so for today's episode, the title is "Where to Begin." How do we start automation? Right. And first, I want to kind of recalibrate our approach to what automation is, because it's kind of a buzzwordy thing. We all sit here in front and say that we know what it is or we know how to do it.

But in reality, it's this amorphous, really hard-to-define process, ultimately, for automating things. And so I like to take a step back and again, raise that level of common language and common understanding. And so I'll just start with that first question of why do we want to automate. What is the point of automation overall? And I like to go real abstract and kind of talk about how

When computers were first introduced to businesses and organizations, really what they were doing was just digitizing the manual physical world and

putting it onto a computer screen to make things more efficient, right? And that doesn't necessarily mean that automation was involved. It's just that computers could find a file and a folder faster than a person walking into a warehouse and searching through a Rolodex to find said file and folder in the storage room. So we've just digitized things to make things faster. And we've continued to do that with software and tools and just digitized what people did physically and manually.

into the digital space, which is great. Businesses have been flourishing off of that, to this day, the practice of digitizing our work. But then what is automation really, when we understand that, okay, we have manual work that everyone is doing and we've digitized it, which made it better, but now we want to automate it. What is that actually doing? What is it that we're really doing with that? And so just understanding that...

Technology is everywhere. So many things have been digitized already, but when we want to approach it from this angle and lens of how to automate it, we kind of have to think differently. We don't have to sit there and go, okay, here's the manual process. Let's just speed it up by applying automation. Let me write a script that does the manual work faster or automatically, right? Instead, automation should be a bit of that perspective of do we even need to do this manual work in the first place now. With technology being so embedded in how we operate and how we function, do we even really need to just do the same things faster? And instead, do we just eliminate all of that work entirely and find a shortcut between the A and B technological solutions that exist? Let me go a little slower on that concept there,

it's kind of hard for me to even articulate perfectly well, is that say you have a manual process of a payment system, where a person walks up to the register, gives them the dollar bills, they receive the item that they paid for with the dollar bills, the cashier has to calculate the change pull the change out, give them the change, right? Manual. We've then digitized that work through point-of-sale systems where now all the math is done automatically. There's still the counting of the dollar bills whenever there's a cash transaction, but for the most part, we've digitized and thus sped up this entire process of purchasing an item at a cash register.

But from an automation perspective, you know, we can kind of look at that entire process of let me give you the thing and then you calculate and then give me the thing, and instead, like how we've seen at some of those grocery stores out there where you just grab the item and walk out.

because that entire exchange is just eliminated now by using automated technology in a new novel way. So instead of thinking about, oh, well, tap to pay is this automated way of exchanging all those bills, not really. It's just a more efficient way of the same manual process of doing the math and exchanging the value of the money and the item. Whereas we can, through automation, completely remove that entire process.

So try to think and look at your business in a way, we have technology all along the chain of how we get things done here. And how can we just eliminate some of these certain steps and have an entirely new way of doing business with that new perspective of automation in mind?

And so that kind of goes to the, okay, you know, we have that one example, but what else is there to automate? Obviously, it's impossible for me to just point out and say, Oh, you should be automating this and this across all of your complex industries, compliance standards involved, and operational issues to overcome, right? It's a massive feat to automate anything. But that's where kind of, again, taking that first bare-bones beginning steps is to understand.

what it is we're trying to do with this automation, which is ultimately to bring value to the business, right? We're looking at how your company is operating and you need to look at it and say.

what can we do to bring more value out of it? That's a value to the customer, right? That's customer satisfaction even, value to the business in terms of the money, right? How do we get more dollars in, and fewer dollars out? So, you know, increasing the gains, reducing the waste, you know, is just its section of value. But I like to kind of reference the Disney theme parks or the Universal theme parks here in Orlando, where

the value is about the experience of the customer, the experience of the end user, not just efficiency behind all things. And so technology can even play its part in regular business operations to enhance the customer experience. So just a few thoughts and ideas of that perspective of talking to...

your partners in the business, talking to your managers, your leaders, your decision makers, and your people on the ground floor that are closest to the product, closest to the customer, to the service that you're delivering, and trying to see what is it that we're actually trying to accomplish and how could technology enhance that? How can we enhance the business through automation?

And sit on that challenge, sit on that for a while. That might take a quarter, two quarters a year of continual engagement and talking to them to really learn. And I think that's the most important part. If you take anything out of this is to learn from your business as much as you can. You are the expert in your world of technology. You are not an expert in sales. You are not an expert in marketing.

You are not the expert in business administration or the expert in whatever operational task at the warehouses, factories, or hospital floors, right? You're not a doctor or anything else. So you need to ask questions and keep that open mind and perspective of what ultimately are your goals in your area of expertise and how can I apply my area of expertise to that.

And so it starts all in that identifying realm. Start at that bottom foundational layer of learning and identifying not only the problems and then start spitballing solutions but identify the value, the purpose, and the goal of what it is that you are doing as an organization and then ultimately as a team and as partners.

Um, and I do want to give you something tangible on the how to say, say that you're already very in tune with what it is you do as a company, um, but you're coming here and listening and sticking through this to try to find out how to actually get this stuff done. Oh, one of my favorite things. And, you know, it wasn't something that jumped first in my head, you know, as a, as a technology practitioner first, my thought is how can I build something? How can I write a script and integrate these two products and get this cool thing out and say that I did it. When.

really sometimes the easiest and cheapest, fastest option, getting all three of quality, affordable and quick is to just buy it. There are so many tools that are off the shelf available that recognize the same problems that you're trying to solve and have figured out ways to bring value in the ways that you're trying to as well as your businesses as well. And you might not just be shopping enough. Quite a few times at our sales booths I like to shadow and encroach on our sales team, there's just a listen to those folks that walk up to our booth and have no idea who Audemox is. And once they kind of learn that we can do what we do, they sit there and go, whoa.

Okay, yeah, like that's something that I have an entire person for and they would love to have you in their toolset so they can focus on something else, right? Because we're not trying to eliminate people's jobs. What we're trying to do is just make it easier to do the work. So you can apply your skills and knowledge get rid of the remedial task and toil of each day and move on to bigger and greater things. And so go shopping.

Go to conferences and events, use the Google, trying to find, again, that higher level technical solution to that problem. I've heard the conversation about shadow IT, small rant here, right? Where we've sort of resisted our business partners finding their own value solutions because with a credit card, they can just go and buy a new tool. They should be going to you for this stuff first, as the partner to say, hey, we're trying to solve this business problem, and we want you to help us shop.

We want you to help us find the best thing. Um, and if they're running around and doing it without you, then you need to go back to step one on the, why do we automate it's because you're the technology expert, they should be feeling comfortable enough to come to you as the technology expert to help them shop. Uh, so definitely approach your business in that new way and think about automation in a way of just buying it cheaply quickly to bring that immediate value to the org. And like I said earlier, we kind of all know this where integrating is the next most important thing, I would argue, in that you have 10, 15, in some cases, 100 plus tools that everyone is using in their own little silos. If we could just get the data from A to B program or get this process out of someone's Excel sheet and into a database, then things would be so much smoother.

And that's a lot of that cloud engineering, system engineering work to integrate our tools and systems together. But again, there are things off the shelf that can help you with it. But we all know that integrating is a key function of automation. And so, again, you have to start those conversations with legal security compliance and get that sponsorship at that leadership level to help figure out how you can get these things integrated because of the value it's going to bring once it's done. It's not just about saving man hours, not just about saving time and effort. It's about bringing that value to the customer that keeps the ship afloat.

And then lastly, you have to call it out, which is the coding languages, the scripting as a fundamental base of automation. I cannot recommend the importance of those PowerShell, Python, and Bash courses, but we all know that with the advent of AI, those LLMs are coming in hot and fast. And with LLMs coming through - they made it so much easier to build out scripts and build out that kind of solution. There are a lot of questions about the validity of these kinds of tools, but we're going to see them get stronger and better. At some point, I'm calling the shot, and this is the "Stupid Statement of the Day" brought to you by David. David's dumb statement is that Python is a programming language that allows humans to interact with a language to then communicate with a compiler to write the program,

I say that we're going to see LLMs be the coding language that we interact with as humans. We're no longer going to need to understand the syntax and logical flows of a program. Instead, we're just going to ask the LLM what we want the program to do, and it'll figure it out and test for us, which I think is just going to unleash a whole new realm of pressure to automate and apply this kind of technology into our business, which we've already seen the pressure to implement LLMs. So be ready for that implementation of new scripting technologies, new ways to integrate and mess and move around with data by again identifying how you can bring that value.

So we're gonna keep this one short and sweet as episode one. They might get a little longer as we bring some guests in, bring some of you on board, and get the conversation going. So thanks for sticking around this far and listening to me spit out my stuff. It's funny, cause it feels super sponsored and this is kind of cool. I have a sponsored podcast in episode one, but it was brought to you by Automox, the Automate IT podcast.

We're going to be talking a lot more about IT automation, diving in deeper. This is just the high-level stuff I'm throwing out there to test and see how you guys think and feel about this. And so, yeah, stick around for the next episode. We're going to be diving into IT maturity and how we define that. And then see if we can walk you through bringing your organization to a higher level of IT maturity overall. Thanks. Bye.