Automation maturity

While there is no formal system for measuring automation maturity levels, there are some basic concepts of automation maturity that we can discuss. The idea here is that organizations sit, more or less, along a continuum from having no automation to being fully automated with most organizations sitting somewhere in the middle, but more likely to be towards no automation than towards being fully automated.

Not every organization needs to be, or even should be, completely automated. But in general, more automation is better when the cost to implement the automation is low enough to do so. Automation is not free, and it is quite possible to find organizations investing more in automating a process than it would cost to perform the duty manually over the lifespan of a system. We do not want to automate blindly only for the sake of automating.

Typically, however, what we find is organizations skipping automation in nearly all cases and uses manual labour with all...