Blog & Newsroom

Find and Stop the Hidden Risks of Legacy Automation

Out-of-date workload automation tools can cause headaches for IT, but they also have wider implications for businesses that shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s likely you’ve read about what can happen: mammoth fines for data breaches, nightmare flight cancellations and communications outages. These incidents cost millions in revenue and productivity. They cost even more in lost goodwill and trust. These events often share something that’s not in the spotlight—technology that’s at the center of their processes—legacy scheduling and workload automation tools.

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Modern Workload Automation Improves Business Outcomes 3 Ways

We’ve already established that migrating to modern workload automation is easier than most people think. There are three key benefits that deliver guaranteed positive business outcomes. In “The Shifting Role of Workload Automation”, analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™) found that a majority of IT and business professionals strongly agree that their organization could be made more efficient by upgrading their scheduling and workload automation tools. They’re right. Three of the most attractive outcomes of modern job-scheduling software are that they improve speed,

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It’s Payback Time – Eliminate Technical Debt from Legacy Scheduling and Workload Automation Tools

By Neil Kinson, Chief of Staff, Redwood Software It’s Payback Time – Eliminate technical debt from legacy scheduling and workload automation tools Moving to more agile and modern scheduling and workload automation (WLA) supports your goals now and into the future. It’s clear that organizations that have made the move are happy they’ve made the switch, too. Many IT teams are pleased to discuss how much more efficient they’ve become after upgrading their automation technology.

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The Challenges of Moving from Legacy Schedulers and WLA Tools (and How To Overcome Them)

We’ve recently discussed how some companies end up with a mixed bag of workload automation (WLA) tools, and the reasons this can happen. It’s all very well talking about this after the fact, but the reality is that many businesses – all too many – are caught between the ‘old’ world and the ‘new’. The concerns about fully migrating away from old technology will be familiar to many: data integrity is paramount, downtime is an unacceptable outcome,

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Why So Many Schedulers? And Why It Causes Headaches

In an ideal world, a single technological solution would provide the answer to all your needs. If it fulfils the fundamentals of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) too, then all the better. In reality though, businesses rarely operate in such a straightforward way. Tools often duplicate some existing capabilities and omit other critical ones. But no one sets out with this goal. What actually happens is that someone has a problem, so they find a solution – it’s not the neatest,

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Process Automation for Unicorns – The Secret to Billion-Dollar Success?

Regular readers of the technology and business press will probably be familiar with the term ‘unicorn’ – first popularized back in 2013 by TechCrunch. It was used in an article about venture capital, and referred to the unlikely eventuality that any startup an investor backed would go on to achieve a valuation of more than $1 billion. It was also a fairly narrow definition, as it only looked at US-based software businesses started since 2003.

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Automate for Simplicity and Flexibility

In 1960, Vice Admiral Paul D. Stroop, chief of the US Navy’s weapon’s bureau at the time, put a plan in place to increase the reliability and reduce the cost of producing the Navy’s aerial weaponry. Project KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) was born – and it’s a principle that’s still applicable to most enterprises today, despite the seemingly highly-complex, interconnected processes that drive them. Putting automation at the heart of processes is essential to achieve the always-on approach most businesses now require – and settling for time-based batch processing just doesn’t cut it anymore.

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The Always-On Enterprise Can’t Exist Without Automation

By Darrell Maronde, Product Marketing Manager, Redwood Software There are few more visible examples of the so-called “always-on” enterprise than Amazon. Whether it’s one-hour parcel deliveries or provisioning an AWS cluster, your interactions with the company and the behind-the-scenes processes are almost fully automated. Each time a customer (or employee, for that matter) interacts with Amazon, a whole host of automated processes within the company’s sprawling IT systems seamlessly kick into gear to ensure that those packages are delivered,

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Upping the Ante: Process Automation Without Collaboration Between Business and IT Stakeholders is a Gamble That Won’t Pay Off

Attempting to roll out any new process or software across a business is always a challenge, but it’s one that can lead to a misguided disillusionment with automation if you don’t collaborate and work together. It isn’t just about identifying the right processes and tasks suitable for being handled by workload automation (WLA) technology such as RunMyJobs by Redwood® scheduling – it’s also getting the entire company on board with the plans. It’s about ensuring that departments don’t operate in disconnected siloes of information.

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Automated Scheduling in Action: How Whitbread Achieved Automation Success

Since the start of the year, we’ve devoted time to discussing the benefits of automation, as well as the real world costs and potential pitfalls of relying on outdated workload automation (WLA) solutions. And while we pride ourselves on the simplicity, scalability and transparency of the process automation services we deliver, we also know that real-life examples can really help people see the benefits and envisage their own automation journey. Simplify the landscape One of the biggest problems enterprises face when considering newer automation technologies is the patchwork of tools they’ll be replacing.

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The Risks of Out-Of-Date Automation Technology Part 3: A Decreasing Pool of Skills

In the final post of this three-part series, we examine the problems that can arise from a lack of key skills. Don’t miss parts one and two, which looked at sustainability and complexity issues associated with ageing automation technology and the costs of relying on outdated workload automation (WLA), respectively. Any company that relies on outdated automation and scheduling tools runs a plethora of different risks, some of which we’ve looked at previously.

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The Risks of Out-of-Date Automation Technology Part 2: Beware the Hidden Costs

In the first post of this three-part series, we examined the wider issues that can arise in terms of sustainability and complexity. This week, we’re looking at the costs of relying on out-of-date workload automation (WLA) or scheduling technology. The need for a business to be responsive is – as we and those wiser than us have noted many times before – crucial. Whether it’s customer-facing functions or back-office nuts and bolts, the ability to respond immediately to changes is a constant.

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The Risks of Out-of-Date Automation Technology Part 1: Sustainability and Complexity

This is the first post in a three-part series looking at the specific risks to businesses that rely on ageing automation technology. If you look at the automation market today, it can be a confusing landscape – particularly if you don’t already have experience of completing a successful automation project under your belt. On one hand, a large number of options might sound like a good thing: More choice is good, isn’t it? Well, it can be,

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3 Simple Tips for CIOs Undertaking an Automation Project

Last week, we discussed how the role of the CIO, far from being under threat, is becoming more vital than ever before for the successful implementation of wide-ranging projects – particularly where automation is involved. However, to turn that perceived threat into a clear advantage, CIOs will need to embrace changes to their function in the same way they must embrace new technologies. When it comes to automation implementations, there are three key ways a CIO can help ensure success.

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CI Uh-Oh: Is the CIO Role under Threat from Automation?

There’s an assumption that, with the rise of roles like digital transformation officers, CIOs are being overlooked; that they’re being replaced and superseded. That’s not true though. Or at least, it certainly shouldn’t be true, as there are different skill sets required for each. Where digital officers may have the brief to deliver against wide-ranging transformation projects, they aren’t necessarily the people with the deepest technology knowledge. By contrast, the role of the CIO is to ensure the right skills,

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Growing Pains: Why Perpetual Change is the Only Answer

If the constant pressure to modernize, transform and generally maintain a state of perpetual change feels like an invention of the modern age, you’d be wrong. In the 6th Century BCE, Greek philosopher Heraclitus stated that “the only thing that is constant is change”. While recognition of the need for change – or indeed, the inevitability of it – isn’t news to businesses, acting on it is by no means easy. The need to implement a digital-first strategy isn’t the sweat-inducing demand that it once was – but the unpleasant truth is that we want to change without going through the uncomfortable process of changing.

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What’s the Difference Between AI and Machine Learning?

There’s an awful lot of marketing noise around the ‘machine learning’ and ‘artificial Intelligence’ capabilities of much consumer- and enterprise-facing software. But the interchangeable use of terms that mean different things has led to a lot of confusion. So let’s clear up, once and for all, exactly what machine learning means, and why it’s useful. Machine learning In short, machine learning is akin to a human learning how to perform a task more efficiently (or to result in a better outcome) through a process of trial-and-error.

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Going Beyond (Way Beyond) Entry-Level Workload Automation

The benefits of automating repetitive operational procedures are clear, at least in theory. Workload automation can provide improved process efficiency, better visibility and allow a more agile response to an ever-changing technological landscape. But it’s that ever-changing nature that causes headaches for many automation solutions – adding highly-effective, but single-purpose, tools leads to an unavoidably complex IT landscape spread across on-premises, cloud and hybrid deployments. And this isn’t a situation that’s going to change anytime soon,

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What Augmented Intelligence Means for Your Workforce

We’ve spent some time over the last few months talking about what Artificial Intelligence (AI) means for businesses, looking at where AI intersects with automation, and explaining why the term AI itself can be problematic. That last point is a key one, because without knowing what set capabilities a term like Artificial Intelligence encompasses, expectations can easily become out of line with the reality of certain tools. Rather than focus on the underlying collection of technologies and how they’re defined,

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How Automation Solutions Need to Evolve in 2019

January is a great time to look at the year ahead and sketch out a few ways the automation market needs to evolve in 2019, to the benefit of both vendors and customers. Digital Darwinism, or slowly falling behind competition as you fail to adapt to new technologies, is a real thing. And it’s a fate that has felled many companies. But business as usual isn’t an approach that incorporates the future vision required for evolution.

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Is Automation the Answer to Your Compliance and Governance Headaches?

You don’t have to be a bank or insurance company to know the value of having bulletproof compliance and governance structures in place. In multi-national, multi-platform business, correctly handling and generating the masses of data required between on-premises, private and public cloud deployments around the world is a complex goal. In reality, that complex goal is usually driven by less complicated means – often the completion of a series of relatively mundane and repetitive manual tasks,

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What Does Moore’s Law Mean for Business?

Moore’s Law wasn’t intended to be a law. When Gordon Moore observed, in 1965, that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit was doubling roughly every two years it was exactly that: An observation. Albeit one that held true for half a century and dictated semiconductor development roadmaps. However, more recent discussions have questioned whether Moore’s Law still applies in today’s technological landscape. Intel (two years ago, no less) changed its roadmap to push back new chip models and thus throw Moore’s Law right out of the window.

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Get the Max from the Cloud

Where are you going? How are you going to get there? Two simple questions, the answers to which determine the future of your business. As the structure of business changes, you must get more from your investments. Changes that don’t deliver real-world value are dangerous distractions. The shift of operations to the cloud can deliver substantial value, if done properly. If you just move lousy practices and processes to the cloud, all you’ll get is a lousy cloud.

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Workload Automation: Stuck in the Middle

Your company probably doesn’t have an IT infrastructure that’s entirely reliant on legacy systems, nor one that has done away with legacy overheads altogether. What’s more likely is that you’re somewhere in the middle, with a landscape that includes multiple public and private clouds, hybrid cloud and those inescapable legacy systems on premises. Figures given in a recent presentation at CloudHealth Connect18 in Boston by Forrester Research’s Dave Bartoletti indicate that 74% of enterprises already have a hybrid cloud environment in place – and that figure rises to 86% if you prefer the figures of Forrester Consulting.

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