🛣️ The Road Between Automation and Autonomous Operations
🛣️ The Road Between Automation and Autonomous Operations
This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 14, covered a lot of AI news, as usual. But a new concept called Autonomic IT led me to contemplate just how autonomous do we want our automation?
👋 Hi and welcome to The DX Report — the research hub of The DX Institute all about Digital Transformation, the Digital Experience, and the Digital Enterprise. I’m industry analyst, author, and speaker Charles Araujo, and I’m all about providing insights and analysis for enterprise IT leaders as you make the big bets about your organization’s future!
The good thing about the podcast I produce with Hyoun Park is that it forces me to stay up on Enterprise IT news.
The bad news is that it can create a hype bubble that focuses just on what's new and getting attention. The double bad news is that lately it seems that we're getting an all-AI diet.
That's led me to spend a lot of digital ink talking about the need for a pragmatic outlook and focus on the less-than-sexy parts of leading an IT function.
This week, that perspective has led me to focus on a more specific element of this line of thought: automation.
We've been talking about automation since the dawn of the IT function. You could say it's the reason IT exists in the first place. As a result, it can seem almost blasé to talk about it when you have more fun stuff — like AI — to kick about.
But automation is once again a top-of-mind issue for enterprise IT leaders because it is part of a foundational trio, along with data and process, that will serve as the necessary building blocks to take advantage of modern advancements, including AI.
However, unlike automation efforts of the past, the current evolutionary path is leading us to a different place. Past approaches to automation were effectively automating between points of human action. A human actor would take an action, some automation would occur to speed a transaction, and a human would take a next action. The human was almost always in complete control.
Today, we are increasingly talking about much more autonomous sorts of automation.
And it begs the question: how far do we want to take things?
From Automation to Autonomous
This week, there was plenty of talk about AI, as usual. But the combination of two stories really caught my attention. The first was the on-going battle between OpenAI and Google as they rush to introduce a much more agent-based approach to their chat interfaces. (Microsoft may be leading the charge on this front, which I'm sure we'll be covering in next week's episode.)
The second was an intriguing blog post by the CTO of ScienceLogic that introduced the concept of Autonomic IT.
Leaving aside the specifics of each of these technologies for the moment, they both represent a move toward greater levels of intelligent, autonomous automation.
Of course, the concept isn't new. We've been talking about things like lights out operations for decades and companies like BMC have been talking about the autonomous enterprise for several years.
Still, it's mostly been just that: talk.
Even this iteration is still more talk than substance. Much of the talk from OpenAI and Google was a preview of what's coming and I'm frankly not sure how much ScienceLogic claims to be delivering on their concept of autonomic IT. But the promise is now feeling much more real.
And for me, anyway, it left me wondering, how much autonomy would I be willing to accept as an enterprise IT leader?
There is obvious appeal to the idea of a tech stack that runs and heals itself. I love the idea of an autonomous assistant that can act on my behalf.
Well, until you think about it for a minute. Particularly in an enterprise context, there is a ton of risk involved and lots at stake. So, what's the limit? The technology capabilities are rapidly approaching the point where we're going to need an answer.
I don't have one for you, but I do believe it's a question that every IT executive will be facing sooner rather than later. So, you may want to start thinking about what your answer will be.
Happy Listening!
🗓️ This Week in Enterprise Tech, Episode 14
OpenAI and Google go head-to-head, OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team is dissolved, Matt Garman is the new CEO at AWS, what’s the current state of IT budgeting and planning, and how far should you trust the concept of autonomy when it comes to your IT environment? Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park and The DX Report’s Charles Araujo are here again to discuss This Week in Enterprise Tech.
Segment descriptions and links to all the articles we discuss are in the Show Notes, below.
Watch the full episode here:
Or listen to the episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/15104402
📔 Show Notes
OpenAI vs. Google Google I/O was last week, where they announced Google Astra, an AI assistant based on Google Gemini models. But OpenAI may have stolen their thunder by releasing GPT 4.o, a new model powering ChatGPT, immediately prior. Sure, it’s jockeying for position, but what’s the upshot? Charles and Hyoun discuss the implications, and what else may be coming down the pike.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/13/ope...
https://www.businessinsider.com/googl...
Does Risk Still Matter for AI? GPT 4.o wasn’t the only OpenAI news; their “superalignment” team focused on governance and risk has fallen apart, with high-level resignations and reassignments to other teams. With OpenAI’s assertive moves, what does this mean, both for OpenAI itself, and for other AI companies? Is the world currently at risk from “superintelligent” AI? Charles and Hyoun dig in.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/18/ope...
https://x.com/janleike/status/1791498...
AWS Names Matt Garman as New CEO Adam Selipsky is out and Matt Garman is in at AWS. Hyoun and Charles consider what this means for Amazon’s strategic direction; why the shakeup now?
https://www.runtime.news/adam-selipsk...
CIO Challenges in Managing IT Budgets In the planning and budgeting world, software is getting to the point where a realtime assessment of a company’s financial picture is quite possible. IT has done well with providing realtime information on a company’s network performance, but what about IT budgeting and planning? Charles and Hyoun debate: is it time for IT departments to start prioritizing that, too?
https://diginomica.com/planful-perfor...
“Autonomic” IT: Finding the Heartbeat of Your Company ScienceLogic proposed the concept of “autonomic” IT: an autonomous IT environment where your systems achieve IT utopia: always available, issues are automatically responded to and quickly addressed, sometimes without needing any human intervention at all. How far off from that are we? What parts of your business could operate like this with AI assistance? What parts do you trust to operate like this? Hyoun and Charles assess the possibilities, and the necessary work.