YOU'RE THE FROG AND AUTOMATION IS ABOUT TO BOIL YOU

In an old parable a frog is placed in tepid water whose temperature is gradually and slowly raised to the boiling point.

- Joe Fuller, VP & CIO, Dominion Enterprises

As the water gets warmer, instead of recognizing peril, the frog falls into a calm stupor and is boiled to death. If you’re a CIO, the water you’re getting comfortable in is called automation.

Elon Musk recently predicted that automation will eliminate so many jobs that governments will be forced to pay a universal basic income to each and every citizen, regardless of their work status. McDonald’s stock just hit an all time high after announcing that it will replace human cashiers with kiosks in 2500 restaurants. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has over a thousand people dedicated to their Alexa artificial intelligence platform. Mark Zuckerberg recently told graduating Harvard students that millions of jobs are about to be replaced by things like self-driving cars and trucks. The consensus is clear: automation is going to drastically reduce certain types of jobs. What does this mean for the CIO?

Let’s look at where you are. I bet you jumped on the virtualization bandwagon as soon as you realized how much time and money could be saved compared to traditional rack-and-stack systems administration. You probably embraced agile development and you have at least experimented with DevOps. You may have deployed automated patch management. You might even be exploring ways to automate by pushing computing jobs to public cloud providers and beyond cloud providers. Your CEO and CFO partners have certainly encouraged you to automate, which has sped up IT delivery and reduced IT costs. With automation, you’ve probably improved your group’s performance without cutting staff or spending more on IT. It seems everyone is winning with automation, so where’s the rub?