Adoption of IT Automation – Jonathan Rende, PagerDuty

This is Textron TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throw.

We're here with Jonathan. Randy is a senior vice president for product that pager Duty and we're talking about the economy. And what goes on in the world these days as it relates to it Jonathan.

Welcome the show. Thanks, Mike. Great to be here great to be with you.

As they say it's challenging times out there and even it folks are affected by layoffs and staff reductions and organizations are trying to figure out how to do more with the proverbial less when you seeing from folks out there. And is there a need to finally maybe address a lot of these automation things that we've been ignoring for the last few years. Yeah, I guess the one constant is always changed as they say and things are things are very different in the economy.

Now what we're seeing versus probably six seven months ago and it's it's interesting. We're a fairly young company. We have a young employee base and I was just talking to one of the other colleagues I have today or a couple days ago about you know, lots of our employees have never really seen an economic downturn like this not in the last five ten years and I think there's scrutiny happening from a lot of budget owners out there our customers our prospects and they're starting to ask basic questions given potential belt tightening that's happening.

Should they be thinking of, you know, a variety of vendor should they be looking to consolidate? Top Line and digital growth continues to be the lifebloods of their business, but how can they do that efficiently? How can they do that with an eye towards the bottom line?

I think those are a lot of the discussions we're getting pulled into and of course automation always plays a role and it plays a really Central role, especially when you're trying to do more with less. What do you think is always been the biggest challenge with? Finding ways to automate things.

I mean theoretically have the skill sets. We're all it professionals and yet there's still a lot of manual processes out there. So time and again, what do we keep running into?

It's a it's a really good point of discussion. I always think that automation is such a broad word and there are so many types of automation. There's so many different flavors of it.

And I I think there's you know, there's automating what people do and workflows there's automating machine activities and giving that to the fingertips of you know, individuals and knowledge workers and subject matter experts. There's there's you know, all kinds of different there's automating of events that don't involve people at all and taking action on that ahead of time. There's so there's tons of automation.

That's AI related and non AI related I think one of the biggest challenges has been and will continue to be organizational Readiness and kind of maturity towards the right kind of automation for the problems that people are are seeing there's no there's never been a lack of feeling the pain from repetitive tasks activities that people feel that could be done over and over again, but it's usually the people issues the the human to human interaction that causes the friction meaning art. Do we feel comfortable with this type of automation? Is it something that we don't want to hand on the button so to speak is it is it something that we can recover from or change if it starts do we have the expertise in house to actually Implement and get it going and then maintain it over time.

There are a whole host of challenges to your question. And so many of them start with just the The social the cultural aspect of the organization we seem to find over and over again. Do we maybe not start the conversation on the right foot because people here Automation and they go, you know, my jobs threatened.

But in reality what we're really kind of saying is, you know, your job has a lot of drudgery involved and it kind of sucks in some ways and we're trying to automate it a little bit to make it easier and a little more perhaps enjoyable. So maybe we just aren't leading with the right message up front you bring up a great point, you know years ago. I used to work in an industry when it first came out.

This was 20 years ago. I'm dating myself automated testing and all testing of software and applications used to be manual and it was you know, kind of considered the stepping stone into development you had to do this drudgery and you had to pay your dues before you could get in to a developer or an engineering role and A lot of early vendors in that space used to have messaging and positioning much like what you're talking about which is hey eliminate the need for people eliminate that usually doesn't resonate well in organizations. I found over the years.

There's a lot of resistance to that for a lot of good and sometimes not so good reasons and I think what I learned then and it's still pays forward now just like it did back then is it frees up people to do higher value activities. So even back to that example if I had somebody manually testing something over and over again and writing down that this is what they did and this particular test passed manually. Well, if I Freedom up to automate that process what higher level activities that would add more value could they be doing versus just eliminating their job and I think that's where the real power comes in.

We talk about two modes in automation at Duty and one has to do with fully, you know, automatic almost like a robot taking over and that's a very mature and oftentimes challenging objective to get to but then we also talk about a step to get there that a lot of organizations take and we refer to it as the Iron Man step, you know kind of the machine assist where you can do more with Automation and you know how powerful is, you know, the Marvel character, you know Iron Man because of his suit and because of what he can do he can do a lot more and and that's really the concept that seems to resonate more often than not All right. Well, I think that that name Jarvis is probably trademark so we can't go back. to the other side of coin right the it in fact, it's more extended than ever and we don't have enough people to throw at this whole equation.

So at our current rate of growth won't automation as an issue get forced because ultimately we're more distributed than ever. It will I believe it will and I couldn't agree more. I think that we have so few experts in certain areas in every organization.

seems to tax and stretch those individuals to the limit to the point of burnout to the point of where they can't do more and and that leads to dissatisfaction that leads to turnover that leads to again problems in retaining key individuals sometimes and oftentimes the most important individuals in a company that if we don't For most businesses for key organizations. If you don't Implement some level of automation to offload those individuals, they'll leave and then and then where are you as a business with those, you know, those most highly valued individuals with that deep expert and knowledge. And by the way wouldn't it make sense to codify some of that and share it so that you don't become as a business single, you know choke points or single points of failure in an organization.

And so there's a so many great reasons to take a mature in kind of an evolutionary approach to automation. It can pay big dividends. All right, you mean the day when Bob quits and he took all the scripts with them and nothing's documented that day.

Yeah, you remember that and and the day after that is the deer and headlights. Oops, we do. Exactly.

Um There's one way once said though, you know, the trouble with automation is it's one thing to be wrong. It's another thing to be wrong at scale. So how do we put some guardrails in place here so that, you know per chance that we do do something.

That's a little shall. We say Off the Mark that things just don't go completely anywhere. Yeah, this this defines the statement like doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome is insanity.

So we don't want that and I think I touched on it a little bit before this notion of machine assist and you know people assist the notion of automating steps to a broader goal. If you think of you know, the concept the Run book automation, which has been around for a long time or just run books think of it as a set of steps, you know that an individual needs to go through when they're in a kind of a dire situation a time since it is time critical situation. They have to walk through each of the steps and those rules really important.

Some of those things can be automated but just giving the individual a button to push for step three or step 7 of a 12-step or a 13 or 20 step process can save a lot of time and can make things a lot easier. So I I reference this before but this notion of evolving and automating kind of the lowest risk. Most tedious most repetitive tasks first usually show the greatest gains and then working up to level of sophistication where you can link steps three five and seven and then maybe steps three, you know, one two, three five and seven and evolving in that kind of a way once there's a cultural norm and an organization.

It becomes really important. All right in the following up in your point everywhere. We turn these days somebody's talking about AI for this and AI for that and we have ai Ops, of course, you know, what is real about AI Ops and our expectations too high or maybe too low or what exactly should we be thinking about here?

And as you look in your crystal ball for the coming year, what's next? You know, I really don't think it the expectations are too high and I think there's a lot of great. Advances that have been made and I've seen it with many of our customers the benefits they get from Solutions around the space.

We refer to as AI Ops and You know there is there's such a growth exponential growth of information and data today that making sense of it. Is it's getting pushing the limits of what's possible and and thereby if we don't address it in a different approach like AI Ops looking at the information from a machine point of view and making suggestions that again an individual can take action on good bad. Yes.

No use not use. It just seems like a wasted opportunity not to look at that as a part of the decision making now again going back to kind of Automation and AI Ops should everything be automated. Well depends on what that thing is and it depends on how much you want to string together and fully pull people out of the loop and the question always ask in those situations is if you want to completely remove individuals, what is the thing we're trying what is the work item that we're trying to accomplish?

How how risky is it if it's a very low priority Great example is you know, you think of major? Disruptions and incidents in an organization and they're usually ranked from a kind of a priority zero or a P0 all the way to a P4 which is ah, it's just kind of a paper cut. Well wouldn't it make sense to kind of work on those paper cut level first that create interruptions and disruptions to people unnecessarily versus the P0 or the P1 where you know, a shopping cart is down during Black Friday on the most important shopping day of the year.

Probably, you know, we don't want to take the wrong actions on those kind of things but there are so many areas that there's low hanging fruit that just reduce the noise and the Toil and the frustration that everyone deals with that can get great benefits right out of the gate with what we have today your hand in here first guys. We're trying to make it fun again. Hey Jonathan, thanks for being on the show.

Mike thank you very much. It was a pleasure. All right back to you guys in the studio.