How automation will fill IT labor gaps

People who have viewed automation and artificial intelligence with a sense of dread may be beginning to appreciate how it can reduce the boring, repetitive work that is the bane of their lives. In fact, rather than being a threat to human contributions to the enterprise, automation is a powerful enabler of creative, innovative work.

An unwillingness to accept new technology goes back to the beginning of the Industrial Age when people (including the original Luddites) saw machines as infringing on their livelihoods. But the opposite proved true, as industrialization increased employment.

Nevertheless, that wariness about new technology has persisted through the Computer Age as well, most recently with AI. Many people initially had the notion that AI was going to replace people, and that work of all sorts would be taken over by machines. That’s not going to happen anytime soon -- at least not in the way we thought it would.

Instead, automation and AI can serve people by taking over tedious, repetitive tasks that people don’t want to do, while giving them information they can use. An AI program could notice, for instance, that you are facing a problem that’s come up before, show you what your response was, and ask if you want to do that again. AI provides a companion that learns what you do, how you work and can help you get things done more easily.

Rather than replacing people, automation and AI can help make them more productive workers. After all, if autonomous vehicles can handle the routine, though essential, aspects of driving while the driver remains in charge, AI programs can assist staff members in the same way.

Putting a Stopper in Brain Drain

Automation also will help companies address the ongoing shortage of skilled IT workers, which will likely accelerate, with college enrollments dropping and boomers opting for retirement. When you lose experts from your staff, you’re going to have to reinvent the wheel to some extent. Automation initiatives like scripted runbooks that put senior staff members’ expertise into a guide can allow younger staffers to tap into that knowledge.

Meanwhile, the flip side to the changing of the guard among IT staff is that younger staffers are better attuned to today’s working environment. Someone who is about to retire probably did a big portion of their career exclusively through calls and email. That’s not how things work anymore. Email might be in play to a degree, but communication these days is more likely to be done with Slack, shared documents and Zoom. The communication tools being used are shifting, and how people expect to be productive is going to shift, too.

Perhaps just as important, the expectation of timeliness starts to shift. "I'll get back to you tomorrow," shifts to, "I sent you a text five minutes ago. Where have you been?" When you flag something in real-time, you want a response in real-time. Automated tools that supply real-time information will support the ability to respond quickly.

Building the Next Generation of Experts

Critically, automation supports the goal of companies to "shift left" in NetOps as well as DevOps, bringing solutions closer to customers, coworkers, and other stakeholders, in order to increase efficiencies in a fast-changing market. Shift left is where machine cycles can replace brain cycles, and automation can suggest actions that you're likely to want to take because it’s seen what you've done in the past.

At the end of the day, what everyone's trying to do is to figure out how to do more with less and be productive as organizations face economic pressure. It’s also a bid to tamp down on the burden of maintaining complex IT networks.

Ultimately, the promise of automation and AI is not that machines are going to put an employee out of a job. The promise is that machines will take the stuff that you hate to do, and take that off your plate, allowing people to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Automation enables junior staff to focus on more creative work, the challenges that delighted them when they thought about taking a job in technology. It will free them to learn more skills that will help to advance their careers, improving their job satisfaction and making them more likely to stay in place -- and create the next generations of experts.

Image Credit: wan wei/Shutterstock

David Winikoff is Vice President, Product Management, Riverbed.