WTH is an Autonomic System for the Enterprise?

The human body is amazing! It’s a complex and highly evolved system capable of self-regulation and self-maintenance, which ultimately is designed to supports the owner’s goals and objectives (most of the time!) The human body's autonomic nervous system is responsible for controlling and coordinating many of the body's vital functions, including the heart rate, blood pressure, and digestion. These functions are carried out automatically, without conscious thought or effort. 

In a similar way we can think of an enterprise organisation as a complex system. One with the aim of achieving its owners’ goals and objectives (most of the time!). And much like the human body, an enterprise usually has systems and processes that are capable of self-regulation and self-maintenance. 

For almost all of the history of enterprises these “systems” have been operated through “processes” carried out by humans. But that is changing, and the pace of change in itself is accelerating thanks to the pervasiveness of IT systems and the recent advances in artificial intelligence and automation technologies. 

So, let’s park the “human” system and processes to one side and focus on the other backbone of today’s enterprises - the IT system and intelligent automation technologies. IT system are of course practically every system that uses computers, servers, screens, networks, you know, everything that touches silicon chips, creates or consumes data in some way and which is now completely pervasive in any company. 

By intelligent automation we mean the incorporation of artificial intelligence into automation technologies such as robotic process automation combined with a wide variety of advanced Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies including predictive and prescriptive analytics on real-time and historical data, process mining, iPaaS and AIOps.  

Dawn of Autonomic System for the Enterprise

An autonomic system for an enterprise combines the organisation’s system with intelligent automation to provide the capabilities for automatically identifying and modelling processes, reflexively monitoring and assessing their performance, automatically self-configure to meet changing requirements, self-optimise to improve efficiency, self-heal to recover from errors or issues, and self-protect to safeguard against security threats. 

Characteristics of an Autonomic System for the Enterprise

The key characteristics of self-configuration, reflexivity, self-optimization, self-healing and self protection can be applied in a number of different ways to improve the performance of an enterprise, these include :  

Self-configuration: Self-configuration refers to the ability of a system to automatically define or adjust its configuration in response to changing conditions or requirements. By using automated process mining, process definition and configuration tools, processes can be created to fulfil new demands and expanding workloads, without the need for any human intervention.

Reflexivity: Reflexivity is then achieved when the systems continuously monitor and assess performance and make adjustments as needed to optimise operation. This is now being achieved through machine learning that analyse data from systems of record and system event logs, then identifying patterns and trends through statistical and probabilistic analysis, finding correlations, classifying and extrapolating metrics which can then lead to patter and predictions, determining causality and eventually making the needed changes automatically. 

Self-optimization: Self-optimisation builds on the ability to perform analytics from signals, and adaptively improve the performance of the system based on predictive actions. Fixing bottlenecks and improving the responsiveness of systems. 

Self-healing: Self-healing is delivered when system automatically detect and correct errors or issues that arise during operations. Through the use of monitoring and diagnostic tools, problems can be identified and addressed before they become significant problems.

Self-protection: A system's self-protection refers to its ability to guard itself against threats and vulnerabilities. Detecting and preventing malicious activity or unauthorised access can be achieved using security tools and protocols.

Are we nearly there yet?

“The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed” William Gibson

As far as autonomic systems for the enterprise is concerned, today the most forward facing enterprises are well on their way in adopting technologies which deliver these abilities - although no single technology delivers everything in a box, organisations are combining multiple systems to build their autonomic system. 

Unsurprisingly IT Operations have seen some of the more advanced autonomic capabilities being delivered with AIOps solutions starting to identify everything from the need for provisioning compute resources to performing complex anomaly detection and event management and finding system event correlations and performing root cause analysis without human intervention. 

At the same time intelligent automation technologies with the combination of process mining and automated process modelling, are short circuiting the entire process identification and creation steps. With self describing applications providing all the necessary APIs and the resources and actions needed for the more advanced iPaaS solutions to automate backend systems even faster. And Adaptive AI - with the aim to absorb learnings even as it's being built. Think about that for a second. Adaptive artificial intelligence (AI), unlike traditional AI systems, can revise its own code to adjust for real-world changes that weren't known or foreseen when the code was first written.

Get on the bus!

Embracing new technologies that drive towards an autonomic system for the enterprise is not just a smart business move - it's essential for staying competitive in today's fast-paced, tech-driven world. Only by constantly embracing innovations and incorporating the latest advancements, you can ensure your organisation stays ahead of the back. Fact of life - your competitors are always exploring ways to leverage cutting-edge technologies to their advantage. Don't fall behind - embrace the future and reap the rewards of being an early adopter. 

An autonomic system for the enterprise is a game-changer for organisations! By implementing self-managing and self-regulating systems, you can turbocharge the efficiency and agility of your operations. You'll increase the resilience of your entire business by allowing it to adapt to changing conditions and recover from issues on its own - no human intervention is required!