Expert autonomic technology can help businesses prevent the impact of failures by IT staff

London 14 March 2012: IPsoft, a provider of autonomic IT management services, is urging the IT industry to identify issues within their organisation that are a result of human error. The objective is to help businesses to free up time spent executing tasks that could be automated in a bid to ensure that an IT department’s time is invested in innovation to help future-proof them.

“Whether as a result of a lapse in concentration, a lack of knowledge, or a desire to take short cuts, human error is a fact of life and whether we like it or not mistakes and errors will happen. In recent months, the Amazon cloud outage and the Blackberry server outage have both been attributed to human error and demonstrated the significant consequences that IT system failures can have. The reduction of human error across any environment relies on the same basic principles - improved process control and the removal of ambiguity and freedom for interpretation,” comments Terry Walby, UK MD of IPsoft.

Currently human mistakes cost businesses millions of pounds in lost productivity and system outages each year and in 2010 51% of network outages were attributed to accidental human error. It is such a serious issue that financial losses are typically planned against it. However, rather than planning for it, businesses need to see the elimination of errors as a key way both of saving money, and of improving services. Automating processes could remove cost which could then be reinvested in other areas of the businesses to help with regeneration and expansion.

Walby continues, “IT is the backbone that supports the majority of organisations, and using expert systems to automate the control and management of IT environments can prevent many system outages and other service problems. Of all of the departments within a business, IT should be the most innovative and able to use automation to improve process compliance and remove operating risk – and cost.”

Self-learning autonomic tools are able to understand and replicate complex decision making processes, and behave in a similar way to the human cognitive process by constantly learning new solutions in order to fix new problems. The significant advantage they have over human counterparts is that expert systems behave consistently and always comply with the process rules they have been set. By using expert systems to manage consistent administrative tasks, IT workers can then move their focus onto more proactive business projects which require human creativity and intellect.