Why hasn’t workflow automation worked for Corporate IT teams?

Automation in IT work has been a long-sought-after goal, with endeavors stretching back decades.  

The concept is inherently attractive – imagine  a world where tedious, repetitive tasks are handled automatically, where workflows glide smoothly without human intervention. 

The appeal is obvious, and making a business case based on ROI seems almost too easy. Increasing adoption of automation tools by IT teams is a universally accepted conclusion by experts.

At Stitchflow, we primarily serve Cloud Native Corporate IT teams, and their preferred approach to Corporate IT automation is through iPaaS (Integration platform as a service) tools like Okta Workflows, BetterCloud, Workato and Dell Boomi.

Despite these tools being expensive (price points ranging from $5-20/employee/month), every IT team has at least one of these. Automation, efficiency, clear ROI, what’s not to like?

The reality

The problem is that the reality of IT automation falls well short of the promise.

The Stitchflow team was previously the team behind atSpoke, an ML enabled IT Service Management tool, and we had the opportunity to see aggregated automation data across tens of millions of IT tickets. 

The average automation rate for IT teams that used atSpoke was only 5-10% of their work! Less than 10%!

The atSpoke data isn’t the only data set that’s painting a picture of ineffective automation. 

We interviewed over 100 IT managers over the last year about the efficacy of their automation, and the vast majority said automation delivered at best a 10% reduction in their work.

The consensus is that automation at best handles the "low hanging fruit" —tasks that are easiest to automate but often not the most impactful, thus offering limited actual time savings.

Of course, there are exceptions. One of the IT leaders the Stitchflow team works with has nearly 1000 workflows set up in Okta, and is able to manage IT operations for a 1500 person company with an IT staff of 3 people. 

But such examples are more the exception than the rule. It’s far more common to have zero automation workflows versus thousands.

So why is there such a large gap between the promise of IT automation and the reality?

What makes automation hard

We’ve identified five reasons for the ineffectiveness of existing IT workflow automation solutions:

1. Business process nuance

On paper, automating a task may sound simple, but in reality, a lot of the workflow depends on specifics about the teams involved, their location, an employee’s manager, department and specific requirements around the task.

For example, the onboarding process for a sales team member in San Francisco vs. London will differ by the Okta groups and tools, the Slack channels and Google groups they need to be a part of. 

And that’s for one department and 2 locations. Multiply your number of departments, locations and managers and you have 100s of workflows just for onboarding.

2. Every workflow has tons of exceptions

Exceptions are one of the most difficult things to manage when setting up automated workflows. 

Let’s take an example – you want to ensure that only active employees in Google have paid Zoom licenses. 

Simple, right? You run a workflow that checks Google status for every licensed Zoom user. 

Unfortunately, there are usually going to be corner cases that you need to account for. Exceptions like:

• Contractors in certain departments like marketing need active Zoom licenses but they are not added to Google which is only for FTEs

• IT test accounts to ensure Zoom is working fine don’t exist in Google

• You may have some suspended Google users that still have access to licensed Zoom because of an HR or legal requirement

• All active users in Google but part of the engineering team don’t need paid licenses to Zoom

Tracking and incorporating exceptions adds significant overhead to each workflow you set up.

3. Limited data and action endpoints in workflow tools

Even if you’re willing to deal with business process complexity and exceptions, a major challenge in existing workflow tools is limited access to the data and action endpoints you need to actually implement a workflow. 

For example, most workflow tools that support JAMF, a popular Apple device MDM, support less than 20 data conditions and actions. 

In contrast, the JAMF API has close to the order of 2000 endpoints! So when you’re trying to implement a nuanced business workflow with exceptions, you more often than not run into gaps in the data you need.

4. IT workflow automation tool ease of use

Existing IT workflow tools are not known for their user friendly design. Users often complain about the complexity and unintuitiveness of current tools. 

And there’s an unfortunate tradeoff between the complexity of the IT tool and the number of data endpoints it supports (to point 3 above) – so you have a difficult choice of using an easier tool limited capabilities, or struggling through an unintuitive, cumbersome tool if you want more fine grained control.

5. It’s not just set-up but maintenance as well

Finally, when deciding whether to implement a workflow, IT teams need to account for not just the workflow set up cost, but also testing and maintenance. 

Workflow tools don’t really provide ways to verify if everything worked as it should so teams need to periodically check data correctness, as well as update workflows every time there’s a change in either the business process or exceptions. 

Adding this operational tax on each workflow also makes the ROI calculation a bit trickier.

Factoring in all of these points is why automation has been limited and primarily focused on unchanging, low hanging fruit.

Related Read: Why don't existing IT tools help with visibility?

Visibility as a route to more effective automation

At Stitchflow, we’ve been thinking hard about how to make automation more effective, and we have a different point of view as to how to approach the problem. 

We think the best way to get more effective at automation is to actually start somewhere else—visibility. First, have a clear picture of everything about your IT environment and identify everything that needs to be fixed. 

Once you know that, you can more easily plan what needs to be automated, the nuances of the business processes involved as well as any exceptions you need to account for. Starting visibility first will make automation easier and more effective.

And that’s exactly what Stitchflow does. Stitchflow is purpose built to give IT teams 360 visibility across their entire environment.

Stitchflow connects to over 50 IT tools and automatically applies over 100 checks across user access, drift in enrollment between groups, apps and channels, device health, compliance checks, and unused apps. 

Stitchflow identifies exactly what needs to be fixed, enables remediation in bulk, and then automates maintenance so gaps are addressed as soon as they are found.

20+ IT teams from incredible companies have been using Stitchflow since May and are seeing daily value—hours saved every week in spreadsheets, quick identification of gaps in their environments, and the ability to rectify painful issues in bulk.

Stitchflow’s free pilot is commitment-light, requiring no set-up; All you have to do is authenticate your tools and Stitchflow generates a gap analysis. 

Book a demo and learn how you can instantly address visibility gaps and have confidence in the continuous correctness of your IT environment going forward.