The New Automation Mindset

CHAPTER 17Enterprise Automation

“In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented.”

—Clayton Christensen

In this chapter, we'll look at the technical and business capabilities we need for the new automation mindset. We've summarized the capabilities required for each mindset here:

We can see that different technologies in this space cover different capabilities. But some of these technologies offer more technical value than business value. One might optimize for TPS (transactions per second), which measures how many “messages” or events are processed per second. This sounds cool when focusing on the technology, but what exactly does it mean for the business? The TPS rating of an integration tool has no impact on speed, agility, or effectiveness of a businesses. So why do we look at it?

Performance and capabilities matter, but only in the context of the results we want. A very high TPS might be important for certain scenarios, but does that mean we need it for every use case? If it's only applicable to two of 5,000, should it be a requirement? Or does it highlight the need for a specialized tool for those two use cases?

Companies fall into these kinds of tech‐centric views of the world to their detriment. Many sacrifice capabilities that matter to the 5,000 use cases to address the edge cases. Today's automation ecosystem is rife with ...