Page 14 - CT Innovation in Education, November 2021

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The Long Wait: Why It’s
Time for Higher Ed to
Embrace Automation
No other segment will benefit more than education, where rote work abounds.
Damien Eversmann
Chief Architect for Education, North America Public Sector Red Hat
WHILE THE PANDEMIC INTRODUCED A NEW
appreciation for all things digital, its close cousin,
automation, hasn’t gained nearly the same renown. And it should. So often in digitally transformed activities, as people interact with bits and bytes, the processes get automated and improved too. In retail, customers still put their potential purchases in a cart; but when they change their minds at the checkout, nobody has to plod across the store to place the discarded goods back on the shelf. In government, citizens still file their requests; but a mapping app can help road maintenance create the most efficient route for filling the potholes.
Then there’s education. While other sectors have begun to reap the rewards of enterprise automation in dramatic ways, education is lagging. Yet, I’m convinced that no
other segment will benefit more. Nothing highlights the advantages of automation like rote work, which abounds in higher education IT.
The 3 Flavors of IT
What’s unique about education from any other kind of organization is that the typical institution has central IT, of course, but also instructional IT and research IT. If I’m in central IT and I’m standing up an HR application, my goal is to put that system in place with the expectation that it will run forevermore. IT’s job is to keep it running.
But in instructional IT, I may be standing up a classroom environment that is only going to last a semester or a lab that’s going to last a couple of weeks. Then I need to tear
it down and stand up a brand new one the next time that class or lab is offered.
In research IT, I’ll need to spin up hundreds or thousands of nodes to process data for astronomical photography, chemical analysis or whatever the research problem is. When the processing is done and the results are generated, I stop it and scale it all back down again.
There’s a temporary nature to so much of what education
encompasses and the many systems it relies on. And that’s where automation can really make a big difference.
Finding Automation Success
Automation success, however, depends on meeting the needs of its three players: the individual, the team and the enterprise.
Progress always starts with the individual. After all, if the edges of your organization don’t see a benefit, automation efforts will fail: “What am I going to get
out of this?” That’s where a lot of apprehension and misunderstanding come from, because too often, people
As humans, when we start doing things repetitively, we get bored and distracted, we let our minds wander, and we stop paying attention to what we’re doing. Positioned well, automation is really a win- win for both the IT worker and the institution. The organization gets more accuracy and more reliability in repetitive tasks, and the worker doesn’t have to focus on doing the same work over and over.
hear the word, “automation,” and they think layoffs are sure to follow. They don’t think about the real reason for automation — taking the repetitive toil out of their jobs.
As humans, when we start doing things repetitively, we get bored and distracted, we let our minds wander, and we stop paying attention to what we’re doing. Positioned well, automation is really a win-win for both the IT worker and the institution. The organization gets more accuracy and more reliability in repetitive tasks, and the worker doesn’t
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