The Risks of Out-of-Date Automation Technology Part 1: Sustainability and Complexity

This is the first post in a three-part series looking at the specific risks to businesses that rely on ageing automation technology.

If you look at the automation market today, it can be a confusing landscape – particularly if you don’t already have experience of completing a successful automation project under your belt. On one hand, a large number of options might sound like a good thing: More choice is good, isn’t it?

Well, it can be, or it can be paralyzing.

Unfortunately, the potential for confusion between the capabilities of multiple automation tools (we’re looking at you, CA) leads to confused, disappointed and disillusioned customers.

If choosing between many different automation tools wasn’t tricky enough, there’s a niggling worry in the back of your mind that says, ‘but what if they stop supporting it or sunset it entirely?’.

And that should be a question you consider. However, by choosing solutions (such as RunMyJobs by Redwood® scheduling) from a long-established automation specialist like ourselves, distracting product diversifications and acquisitions aren’t going to impact your company’s future.

But what if you’re already invested in CA, or other scheduling software built on legacy architecture? Many organizations are, and many know how tricky it can be to achieve what should be simple automation goals with out-of-date tools that are tied to ‘new day’ schedules.

The new digital world has set expectations—both personal and professional—for immediate responsiveness. To support this, IT needs a process-centric view that can run tasks at any point, whether in the system of record, or according to release management based on DevOps. Scheduling tools that base planning on a daily model simply cannot adapt to the current dynamic environment that changes by the minute.

Even the cost to businesses of relying on out-of-date schedulers can be notable – requiring special skills and training. As this usage complexity increases, automation projects start to get a whole lot messier. By contrast, some of our customers have already achieved an 11-times reduction in the number of automation tasks they run, simply by using our no-nonsense, visual process editor.

In the next post, we’ll look at the perils of ambiguous pricing when using out-of-date automation tools.

To see if RunMyJobs by Redwood scheduling can exceed your automation requirements, try our no-commitment free trial at www.redwood.com/runmyjobs