For industry CIO's, there's a lot to think about these days. At companies across industrial sectors, the potential for launching innovative projects has never been greater. With enterprise mobility spreading across industries, CIOs are focusing on improving customer relationship management, implementing bring-your-own-device policies, and finding new and innovative ways to cut the budget.
But in order for IT personnel to carry out these tasks, they need the budget for it. All too often, businesses are faced with the problem of channeling too much time and money into managing and monitoring the enterprise schedule. This prevents the opportunity to pursue more enterprise-building functions that IT teams should be tackling. Fortunately, workload automation presents a solution to the challenges of enterprise scheduling that can enable IT workers to turn their focus to better initiatives.
Freeing Up IT Resources Through Workload Automation
Within a business IT environment, there are many different tasks that need to function on a regular basis. The maintenance of a payroll program, for instance, is one such task. The regulation of accounting information is another. Then there is data from sales and inventory and many other functions spanning the business. Data from these various processes must be sent to different departments, such as human resources for payroll information and finance for accounting figures. For many enterprises, what often ends up happening is that the sheer number of different IT jobs and applications in a corporate system create a workflow that, when done manually, eats away at IT time and detracts from more important tasks.
Workload automation and job scheduling solutions like Automate Schedule prevent that from happening. Automated scheduling software works in an easy-to-use format aimed at integrating and consolidating business-central applications. This consolidation leads to centralized monitoring, which takes the pressure off the IT department to manually run multiple schedules. By offering companies a single point of control for scheduling, what was once a complex process turns into an efficient one. Here are some of the key ways automation frees up resources within corporate environments:
- Single control point leads to greater efficiency: As TechRadar points out, one of the key benefits of automation is that it creates a central base of operations where data for all business-critical applications is stored. This is a key time-saver, particularly in a corporate world that's increasingly relying on multi-user systems with not only desktop but also mobile and cloud components. Right off the bat, the streamlining of various IT processes creates a system that's far more efficient than having multiple schedules. This efficiency saves IT staffers a lot of time.
- Puts small businesses on par with larger ones: A big business can fall back on a large IT team and powerful network to handle its workload needs. But as Tech.Co points out, this hasn't been the case for small businesses, which have historically been saddled with cumbersome levels of manual IT management. However, workload automation solutions now offer small organizations the opportunity to enjoy the expedient IT performance of their big business counterparts."Whereas before small businesses were limited by their budgets and less developed IT infrastructure, now workload automation is within their grasp, and with it the benefits of a more productive business," Tech.Co stated.
- Limits errors, thereby saving time and money: When you have a lot of control points in a business system and they're all being overseen manually, it's inevitable that human errors will occur. But the consolidation of control points into a single point that's centrally managed eliminates human errors, which saves funds and time.
All of these things free up time and resources as far as IT workers are concerned. And it's not only IT staffers who benefit. According to a study of a large enterprise healthcare company, the implementation of a workload automation solution led to an up to 80 percent boost in staff productivity. With this freed up time, a new question arises.
What Will You Achieve With Workload Automation?
Think about what your business IT team could be doing if it had more time—that is, if it didn't need to worry about manual scheduling. With automated scheduling solutions, this scenario becomes a reality. Once a company's Automate Schedule solution is in place, it can turn its attention to other important IT matters. Here are just a few of the things IT managers and CIOs can focus on once they no longer have to worry about job scheduling:
- Looking for ways to mobilize: Business mobility is more than just a buzzworthy concept—it’s a future-focused approach that's transforming the way businesses run. From bring your own device policies to the construction of enterprise apps, there are many different ways that mobility is playing out in the enterprise sphere. For this reason, as Information Management points out, it represents one of the top priorities for CIOs and IT staffers in 2015. Not having to worry about manual scheduling leaves IT employees with more time to focus on developing and refining their business' mobile strategy.
- Focusing on implementing wireless connectivity: Today, there's an expectation among consumers that places they shop will be fully connected. For companies not up to par yet, this places pressure on IT personnel to roll out resources like in-store Wi-Fi as quickly as possible. But if the IT team is burdened by manual scheduling, it's easy for the task of enhancing connectivity to become sidelined. With more time, IT staffers can focus on making their business more connected.
- Managing data security: There are a lot of cyber-threats out there, and IT teams aren't doing enough to prevent them. One big reason IT experts aren't tackling enterprise security is because they feel too encumbered by other tasks. But the move to job scheduling and automation opens up an opportunity for CIOs and IT teams to properly gear up against hackers.
With Automate Schedule, automation paves the way for new business opportunities. Start a free trial today to begin experiencing the ROI benefits of workload automation.
