What CTOs and CIOs Must Do in 2022: Replace IT Work with IT Automation

IT today is labor-intensive, time-consuming, expensive, and cannot scale. InfoNovus Instant IT AI-driven automation transforms IT, making it automated, instant, economical, and scalable.

Every CTO and CIO must do more with less, deliver results faster, and keep up with accelerating business demands. This post is a short summary and action plan for CTOs and CIOs who want to improve their organization’s ability to meet the needs of the business.

Why IT Automation Is Needed: IT Today Can’t Scale

I addressed the problem of IT scalability in depth in an earlier post, so this post focuses on the challenges IT executives face and how Instant IT solves them. The essence of Instant IT is that it isn’t a tool used by IT programmers and developers in their work, it is a technology that fully automates the work they do.

The Challenge for CTOs: Eliminating Technical Debt

Technical debt is a term that recognizes there is a cost associated with adding functionality the business needs to applications the business uses. Keeping an application operating as the business needs is a challenge, and results in technical debt when IT can’t keep up with needs of the business. The quantity of code objects and data stores IT is responsible for grows faster than the staff that sustains them, increases technical debt, and slows IT responsiveness. This asymmetry keeps IT labor-intensive, time-consuming, expensive, and unable to scale.

The Challenge for CIOs: Improving IT Productivity

IT work requires technical specialists who design and develop programs and data stores that support business operations. Agile and microservices are approaches to executing IT work, and low-code/no-code tools and cloud-native services are technologies and tools intended to make developers more productive. Rather than making IT design and development of programs and data stores more productive, this work needs to be replaced with automation.

IT will remain an obstacle to business agility until IT work is automated. Instant IT transforms IT into an automated, instant, economical, and scalable operation that solves challenges CTOs and CIOs face.

IT Automation Eliminates Problems with IT Work

IT supports and manages thousands of code and data objects, and each new application or technology adds more. The root cause of IT problems with technical debt and productivity is handcrafting its designs, programs, and data designs. I addressed how IT works, its problems with requirements elicitation, application design representation, and application development, here.

Because an application serves a group of users, design and development are focused on their needs, not those of other groups that might use its data and programmed rules. Artifacts IT produces while designing and developing an application, except for source code and physical data designs, are difficult to keep current over time. The result is that data and rules used in a company are buried in code and may be duplicated, inconsistent, and in some cases incorrect.

Applications are separate sets of programs and data stores requiring support by specialists who understand their programs and data, knowledge that isn’t transferable to other applications. IT technical debt and productivity cannot be solved by continuing to focus on applications and IT design and development artifacts.

The challenge for automating IT is one of accelerating application and program development, helping them adapt to new business needs quickly and easily, and reducing the labor, time, and cost required. Instant IT does this by reinventing application development.

Reinventing application development begins with changing the definition of an application from a set of programs and databases to a collection of user interactions with shared data and rules. Instead of programs and databases, focus on the user experience and consistently applying correct data and rules.

Only with automation can all applications that support a company share and use the same data and business rules consistently in all interactions with their users.

Instant IT Business Design Transforms and Automates IT

Instant IT combines business process modeling / reengineering and AI no-code, non-model driven, application design and development. It does this by describing business processes and how their actions interact with data without requiring design or modeling of application or data objects. Instant IT business design captures exactly how a business wants to operate and the data and rules it interacts with.

A business design replaces requirement descriptions of functionality with precise operational specifications:

• Process workflows for the exact way the business wants to operate.
• Process actions performed in business processes.
• Process action organizational roles and responsibilities.
• Process action data interactions and method of interaction.
• Data element definitions used with semantic consistency in all processes.
• Business rule specifications.
• And too much more to detail here.

The beauty of business design is that it changes the focus of requirements elicitation from general descriptions of business functions to operational business processes and actions. Instant IT transforms application development into deciding how the business wants to operate and the data and rules it uses, not figuring out work IT will need to do to design and deliver an application.

Instant IT computer-generates complete, ready-to-use applications from business designs instantly by:

• Validating the business design – ensure that the business design is complete, consistent, and usable as an application specification.
• Analyzing data affinities and access paths – determine data objects and their content, including history and object linkages. Best practices are incorporated so there are no data redundancies or duplications, abstractions requiring programming to select data, or inefficient data access paths.
• Having the client manage the business design – control business design authorizations, approve application features, and publish API contracts and documentation.
• Having the client control the technology selections – set the databases, API endpoints, application container destination, and so forth, to be used for the application.
• Generating the application – computer-generate the database schema, units of code for individual rules, formats, APIs, and other application features. A code scanner is used and a scorecard for the generated application is included in the generation process.
• Delivering the application in a container – prepare a Docker container and deliver it to the destination as specified by the client.
• Providing general management features – monitor and control the Instant IT metadata and applications with instant IT’s management features.

For more information about InfoNovus Technologies and a fuller description of Instant IT and its capabilities, visit www.infonovus.com.

What CTOs and CIOs Must Do in 2022

Begin Eliminating Technical Debt with Instant IT

Instant IT automated application development transforms IT time and resource considerations, standardizes on core technologies, and reduces the cost of application acquisition and time and effort needed to deploy applications. This is done without incurring technology debt because business designs capture exactly everything a business unit wants to do in its operation.

Adapting to change and eliminating technical debt is easy because applications are computer-generated. If the business needs to change, its business design is changed, and an enhanced application is generated. If the change requires changing the database schema, a conversion program is generated as well. And if a new, better technology comes along, the application can be regenerated to use it.

Increase IT Productivity with Instant IT

Executives want applications that are implemented quickly, support how business units work, have low cost, and deliver fast ROI. Instant IT business designs and computer-generated applications increase business satisfaction with IT and let executives focus on operational improvement and innovation.

Data and rules-based business design, and automated application development, transforms IT from being labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive, to being automated, instant, and economical. Instant IT uses AI to automate application delivery, increases IT productivity 100-fold, and lowers application TCO by 60%.

When IT is transformed through automation, it can scale easily to enable a company’s agility and adaptability.

Enable Business Agility and Adaptability with Instant IT

Business agility will depend on the business’s operational readiness and change management capabilities, not IT’s speed of application delivery. Instant IT provides what a digital transformation is meant to produce: organizations able to respond to market changes, add digital capabilities, and create operational innovations quickly and easily.

There is IT as it is done today, and there is Instant IT. Make 2022 the year to transform IT with Instant IT AI-driven automation of application development and sustainment.