Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The promise of robots integrating into our everyday lives has long been on the minds of forward-thinkers and visionaries. Perhaps none were quite as bold in their future predictions as American chemist and Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg, who envisioned a 21st century in which every home would not only have its own robot, but also an intelligent species of animals that could help with household chores.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employers are losing more than four million workers every single month. That, coupled with the record number of 11 million open jobs, has left businesses across the board scrambling to crack the code and find a way to not only attract top talent – but, more importantly – keep them from jumping ship at the next best opportunity.

In today’s lightning fast digital age, I&O leaders across the globe are finding themselves under increasing pressure to find new and innovative ways for improving efficiency, optimizing costs and delivering fast, quantifiable and sustainable value. In order to achieve these goals, these leaders must not only be willing to adopt cutting-edge technologies, but be strategic about what tools in particular they choose to pursue and how they should prioritize them in terms of potential ROI.

Nearly two-thirds of IT executives say they plan to implement automation technology within the next year and a half. Despite this ambitious goal, however, 50% of those IT leaders admit that a lack of automation skillsets is currently hindering their progress. As the demand on IT infrastructures continues to grow at an astronomical rate, an epic increase in complexity has inevitably followed.

According to a recent global survey by Deloitte, 73%of respondents said their organizations have officially embarked on a path to adopting intelligent IT automation. That being said, only 26% of survey respondents that are piloting automations and 38% of those implementing and scaling actually have an enterprise-wide intelligent IT automation strategy. So, what’s standing in their way?

Running a network operations center has never been simple, yet the scale and complexity that digital transformation has added makes the future of automated network operations look downright dizzying.

Automation has been at the heart of technological progress as far back as the first industrial revolution. In 1733, John Kay’s revolutionary invention of the flying shuttle increased weaving speeds and changed manufacturing forever. The fourth industrial revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, began in 2010 and ushered in an era focused on digitization and virtualization fueled by IT automation.