IT Process Automation: How to Reduce Human Error in Your IT Operations

For centuries, scientists dreamt of gazing into the depths of space to get a glimpse of galaxies, stars, and magnificent cosmic events that had only been seen in the imaginations of curious astronomers. Through years of hard work and a couple bucks (about $1.5 billion), the dream came to fruition in 1990 when the Hubble Telescope found its new home orbiting Earth. Scientists giddily waited to receive detailed pictures of deep space; however, when the first pictures came in, they realized their new telescope was sending back extremely disappointing images due to the misalignment of one of the mirrors. Although scientists fixed it and eventually received spectacular images of space, the problem could have been avoided with a process in place to reduce human error.

Reduce Human Error with IT Process Automation

It’s no secret that humans often make mistakes. And although this is an example of a human error on an astronomical scale (pun intended), when any human error occurs in the workplace, it can have a domino effect on a business’ infrastructure, processes, customer relationships, or reputation. For that reason, it is essential to have a system in place to reduce human error.

What if you could significantly reduce human error in your IT operations?

Process automation removes that often-unpredictable human variable to make your IT operations more efficient and reliable. Whether that means automating reports, upgrading applications, scanning your workstations and servers for updates, or performing mundane regular maintenance, you save time and eliminate the risk by implementing automation in your IT infrastructure, or implement automated systems management tools.

Here’s how IT process automation can reduce human error:

It performs repetitive tasks.

Employees who complete repetitive tasks often get bored, and when employees get bored, they’re more prone to make mistakes. General computer maintenance is time consuming but essential to keep workstations and servers performing at their best. In large environments, this maintenance can completely rob an IT administrator of their time, so developing an automated script to complete this maintenance saves that person from the monotony of having to complete it and reduces human error in IT.  

It installs security updates.

Security patches and updates need to be installed in your environment, including on servers, workstations, and especially applications. Leveraging automation, companies can develop an automated process to scan for and install pending updates, which ensures that components in their environment are kept up-to-date without human intervention. Of course, not only does this streamline the security updating process, but it also reduces the human error in IT.  

It automates monitoring.

Setting up a new server can be a daunting and time-consuming task, so it’s easy for an IT administrator to forget to configure monitoring after the setup is completed. Automated monitoring scripts ensure that servers added to the environment have monitoring configured on them as soon as they are discovered. This can reduce human error and prevent them from forgetting to configure monitoring after the server loses connectivity.  

Next Steps to Implement IT Automation

By implementing an automation solution, you not only reduce human error, you also save time and money. Leveraging an IT automation system for the little tasks that demand so much time allows system administrators to focus on more intricate tasks and reduces the human error in IT.  

Don’t wait until your company has its own Hubble mirror incident to consider implementing preventative measures. Begin the process of reducing human error in the workplace. When you’re ready to start reducing human error in your IT operations, contact us to learn more.