An article in Computer Weekly draws attention to this year’s major drop in IT spend – 5.2% since 2008 according to Gartner. Understandable, but an unintended outcome has been the threat to technology innovation.

IT pros not having the cash to buy new products means that IT suppliers have had to cut their budgets too, including for R&D into new money and process saving technologies. This is a vicious circle at the heart of the IT supply chain.

It’s a universal truth (as well as a slightly perverse irony) that IT departments often have to spend money in order to save money by capitalising on new automated IT strategies driven by smart technology.

Predictions are that 2010 will see an increase of 3.3%, so hopefully the majority of that can be alloated to innovative practices rather than getting lost in the opex budget. Who knows what the new year will bring!?

The UK ICO reports that security breaches have doubled in the last year, and that the world will cave in on itself (probably) unless something is done. But is the answer yet more compliance?

Compliance is like a fart in a lift: certainly it can be arresting, unpleasant, and even suffocating, but it shouldn’t be enough to stop you from going to where you need to get. It’s fall-out is also faintly ridiculous. Have you ever seen grown adults cower like they do when a piece of compliance rips loose in a crowded area?

Many IT pros don’t have the time to faff about with compliance at the best of times, especially not during budgetary pressures brought on by a recession. Compliance, as well as being incredibly boring, is also a very disruptive process taking up time that could be properly spent elsewhere.

Automate compliance? Now there’s an idea…

It doesn’t happen often of course, but sometimes IT pros can get a little carried away, by trying to automate things that just shouldn’t be automated.

A recent article on The Register, tells the tale of some Japanese programmers who have developed an algorithm for emergency call centres that can tell whether you are about to die, by the sound of your voice. What a great idea, it means that workers will be able to prioritise and organise calls, time wasters will (quite literally) be eliminated. The only downside is that seriously sick people could die. Ho-hum…

Unlike these misguided techies, the rest of us value automation approaches which are as good in theory as they are put into practice.

If you know of any crazy automation stories or creations, let us know on our forum.

In a week when tens of thousands of postal workers are out on strike, we reflect back 25 years to the UK government of the time actively crushing the coal mining sector nearly out of all existence. Reportedly, it would have cost around £1bn to save the industry back then. What small beer in the wake of the UK’s present government bailing out British banks with sums far greater than that?

Last month, UK Coal plc – one of the remnants of the old coal industry – announced a new fundraising round of £100m. Fully modernised and – with the advent of ‘clean coal’ power stations – in relatively rude health, the economics of coal have turned full circle. No public investment then, but substantial private investment now…

Perhaps it goes to show that investments spent on improvement and stimulating real strategic value are the best investments. Sinking money into high operating costs cannot be sustainable, whatever industry you are in. In the IT department, the people are the value – but they need the systems to help them show it.

The general election is just around the corner and according to a recent article in Computing “whoever wins will have little choice but to make savage cuts to the back office…meaning IT will be in the firing line”.

Of course, last week came the announcement of public sector pay freeze being sold as the lesser of two evils; getting your pay frozen to help balance the budget is better than having no job at all.

Shifts in government inevitably mean shifts for the public sector IT department and focus can be thrown from one project to the next, ultimately resulting in highly expensive and “over-ambitious projects”, e.g. ID cards. So, what will the next focus be? Computing says, “one area the next government must get right is IT skills.”

On this note, by automating mundane processes you are able to take 100% advantage of your workforce, so has there ever been a better time to automate your IT? Cutting costs whilst concentrating on skills – it’s obvious!

A recent article on The Register claims: “despite the best efforts of the IT industry to automate the pants off computing, it’s all still pretty much people intensive.” Fair statement, but isn’t this the way it should be?

Fundamentally, the idea of automation is to free people from the endless tasks that swallow up valuable time, allowing them to concentrate on more productive and strategic activity. IT pros all too often have their noses to the grindstone. It’s hard to offer innovation when you have to root through all sorts of surprisingly arcane nonsense (most of which is undeniably important just unncessarily time intensive) when with automation processes in place, the innovation can flow.

Here at Automated IT Towers, we put faith in these problem solving systems, but we also value the expertise of the people in IT who keep these clever pieces of technology in order. IT automation can make the breakfast and make the beds, but it will also be people who make the difference.

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.