Automation is often seen as the holy grail for IT administrators. Its advocates promise everything from cost savings and business-process improvements to increased customer and employee satisfaction. But not all automation is created equal, and not all processes are ripe for streamlining.

To find out more, AccessOwl sat down with those at the sharp end of the debate — the IT managers who use (and sometimes eschew) automation in their day-to-day roles. Here are their five takeaways:

1) Don’t default to throwing people at every problem

Maxio IT Senior Manager Shane Fritts is a strong advocate of automation, arguing that — when deployed correctly — it can help IT teams save money and improve efficiency.

“IT tends to be a money sink. So, you need to find ways to do things less expensively and more efficiently,” he says. “One of my biggest pet peeves is that you'll find a lot of IT departments tend to hire a bunch of people to solve a problem instead of thinking outside the box about what they can automate.”

He argues that IT managers need to stop saying ‘yes’ and start thinking about ways to replace human labor with machines — which will ultimately benefit their teams.

“Is there a tool we can buy that’s cheaper than hiring a person? Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a lot of staff. But if you do that, you're going to have a lot of wasted time — and that’s when layoffs hit. Don’t throw people at the problem.”

2) Don’t overcomplicate things

Patryk Przepiórkowski, IT Infrastructure and Security Manager at Connexin, argues that while businesses could always automate more, they also need to pull back sometimes.

“We've not over complicated our automation. We don't have an actual box running 70 scripts in the background to do stuff. We try to use products’ built-in functionality as much as we can,” he explains.

Citing the 80/20 rule, he notes that 80% of workload can be automated in a relatively straightforward manner like this, leaving 20% of the time for the work that has a disproportionate impact and may require a more sophisticated approach.

“I think there's a propensity for technical people to overcomplicate solutions,” Przepiórkowski adds. “And I've been in situations where people have done that and then left the business — and nobody knew how the thing worked.”

3) Tackle the biggest pain points first

This chimes with Derek McGee’s approach. The Airtower Networks IT Manager argues that too often, with inadequate systems, there are “people doing jobs so people can do jobs.” He says that much of this work can be done by built-in automation in tools like Microsoft Power Automate.

“What I would like to do, as a year-out project, is go ahead and take the top three to five largest pain points for the company and automate those as best as possible — to save some time, money and resources,” he says. “Then we can dedicate those to other areas that need them.”

Khoi Pham, IT and Compliance Lead at Coda, adds that automation doesn’t just save the IT lead time, but also makes it easier to hand work over to other team members.

“My focus, as someone who does IT but also owns IT and compliance, is to automate away as much of my job as possible, so I have time to do other things,” he explains. “It can also make certain parts of my job brain-free, so that if I need to delegate to the people that work under me, I can do it easily — without needing to really explain and document the whole process.”

4) Automation can enhance security and resilience

When it comes to identity and access management, automation is the IT admin’s friend, according to Arek Czub, IT Engineer at Relational AI. He recalls how, on joining his current employer, he turned to Google Workspace and other platforms to see how to automate the on- and offboarding process.

“The first thing I thought was: we need to automate a lot of that to make things more secure and resilient to human error, because everything was done manually. Previously, everything was done kind of differently, without a lot of established workflows or processes,” Czub continues. “The first thing I suggested was getting an integration platform-as-a-service tool… and this became a game-changer. It allowed us to switch from thinking a lot about what exactly the person joining the company should be added to, to creating a matrix for who should get access to what.”

Jakub Łączak-Król, IT Asset Manager at XTB, is also a big fan of automation for on- and offboarding – to take the strain off IT administrators and reduce human error.

“Once per month I had a reminder and a checklist to go through each platform and manually track whether any employees who weren’t working for us anymore had access. It was quite a challenge,” he explains. “You want the process to be automated, because if it’s done manually, it’s always prone to mistakes. The companies providing these products should provide optimized security and usability out of the box.”

5) Understand the trade-offs

However, as useful as automation is, it’s not a silver bullet, shares Christopher Kalanderopoulos, Senior Manager, IT & Cybersecurity at Synctera. Sometimes the expected time savings from an automation don’t immediately justify the time it would take to design the process. As an example, he manually built an IT and security compliance calendar inside Notion to help manage PCI and other audits — with some surprisingly good results.

“This year we finished [the audit process] seven weeks faster than last year, because of the process that we put in place — which makes sure that we're collecting audit data throughout the year rather than just at the end,” he explains. “It's one of those things that I could probably automate a little more. But it would take me ten hours to automate to save me five hours a year in total.”

The message is clear: use automation where it can clearly help to improve IT efficiency and reduce operational costs. But also understand that it’s not a panacea. Assess each use case on its merits.