What’s £6 billion of immediate spending cuts between friends?  In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t anywhere near enough to scupper the birth of our new ‘ConDem Nation’ as the Liberals opted to overlook the straight-out-of-the-blocks eagerness of the Tory axe as small beer.  A pragmatic outlook…  When the total overall deficit is nudging ever closer to £1 trillion, cuts are going to have to run a lot deeper than that.

So watch out public sector IT.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon…  Sat in the back-room rather than out and about delivering ‘front-line services’, you can mount your defence with talk of community empowerment, green efficiencies and collaborative productivity gains; it won’t wash.  Florence Nightingale you are not.  Dixon of Dock Green you shall never be.  You are a paper clip.  Economise or be destroyed… please.

Except it won’t really play out like that will it?  Not least because public sector IT departments really are working hard to demonstrably support the improvement of services on the front-line while at the same time underwriting the processes that strip out expensive inefficiencies from back-office operations.  “White elephants aside, we are value for money,” comes the retort.  And before the management on high reply, “sorry, I’m going to have to napalm everything here to within an inch of its life anyway”, we beg the question: do these technology ignoramuses really know what they are cutting back on?  “IT is pretty well plugged into to everything nowadays you know.  What if an oojamaflip fails, or an ossilating pamplebum joo-joo went on the blink?  They’d be dead bodies piling up in the street by teatime…”

The truth is that right at the heart of pretty much every public sector IT department, swathed as they are in software sophistication and network complexity, are manual checklists, duplicated spreadsheets and other pre-1980s working practices that would make a Business Transformation & Efficiency Improvement Change Management Consultant blush.  They are what gets used to fight fires with; diverting precious resources away from innovation, development and renewal.  There’s the waste with no argument not to cut.

So either keep it all hidden from the bean-counters that stalk your corridors or, for all our sakes, automate IT so that the budget you have left can be spent on the things that really matter rather than the operating processes that really don’t.

It is Friday, which in the Automated IT towers often means an excitable hive of happy activity. We thought we would share in that happiness by highlighting some good news for IT and Technology workers. Silicon have reported that “many IT professionals can expect to see their salary rise by around an average of £10,000 every five years.”

Now before you go cracking open the bubbly, take your time to read the research, it is better to savor good news slowly. Apparently “Techies working in project management are those likely to see the biggest jumps in earnings as they progress up the career ladder.”

Security is one of the IT certainties that you could probably add to the “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes” proverb. Although, perhaps Benjamin Franklin wasn’t exactly clued up with the debate around automating IT security processes.

One thing Franklin did often refer to was laws; compliance if you will, something that has driven the IT security world (nuts?) for a number of years. Compliance to meet the security and regulatory changes that have occurred in the last decade has been a central factor in the development of IT management processes.

Do you know your PCI from your Data Protection Act; your HIPAA from your MiFiD? Details are just a smokescreen when the problem is that wherever compliance is mandated, it has often meant manual responses such as sifting through security reports and events for malicious activity. This is a hugely inefficient process made worse by regulatory pressure. While regulators will continue to bring in new standards and such like, security has become a far wider, holistic entity within an organisation.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is one such technology that can greatly aid IT managers in trying to automate and add efficiency to security processes. The benefits to such a solution can include; improved detection of cross-enterprise threats, ending the need to interrogate multiple data sources, space and power savings, and empowering more professionals with less specialised skills to be able to carry out the task. And that’s to say nothing of the enormous compliance benefits…

Happy Birthday Cloud

So the Internet is 40 years old this month; assuming of course that you carbon date one of IT’s most seminal births back to when a few ARPANET boffins first started tinkering with their nodes.

Regardless, all IT pros agree that a lot of ‘cutting edge’ technology has become obselete during that period. Disk storage no longer means a filing system for floppies, high-speed communications are now Gigabit/s rather than Kilobit/s, and ‘the great fax machine revolution’ is something we prefer not to talk about. 40 days is a long time in IT, let alone 40 years.

But while IT continues to be dynamic and evolutionary, the repetitive manual processes that often surround it are stuck in the dark ages. IT is still exciting and surprising, but it is also a utility service; a cost-centre; a business-critical asset.

So what does the future hold for IT? With all the business pressures and expectations, is there still room for innovation? With the constant need to integrate and exploit new technological capabilities, how can IT maintain financial and operational discipline?

They say life begins at 40, so it’s worth considering operational improvements sooner rather than later. Then again they also say 40 is the new 30. In any case, it’s a numbers game…

Supposedly web 2.0 is an IT Manager’s nightmare, but at Automated IT we want to defend IT Managers’ (via Twitter, blogging, facebook natch) willingness to embrace web 2.0. It is great to see Computer Weekly give credence to the idea of being innovative with IT resource, but IT Managers seem get a bum rap in the article.

IT Managers are not bulwarks to innovation, they are managing and delivering crucial IT services. The bulwark is often the amount of resource and manpower they have to spend on operations, the everyday stuff that is important but probably not the subject of glowing press articles. IT Managers are never given a pat on the back when (as per most of the time) IT works like clockwork, only when things go awry.

So my message to those criticising IT Managers is that if you want IT departments to be more able to innovate, liberate them through automating IT processes. Automating your bread and butter operations can free up IT staff to provide the gourmet innovation you demand.