Understanding Automation: How To Do More Than You Have the Resources For

While “automation” can sound like “layoffs” to many individuals, automation is at its best when it’s helping and enriching people’s jobs, not overtaking them. There are numerous technologies under the umbrella term “automation,” encompassing everything from the mechanical clock to the personal computer. In general, automation refers to the creation/application of technologies and systems that require little to no human intervention.

When taking advantage of automation technologies, employees spend less time, effort, and resources on menial tasks and are free to spend that time employing their talents toward high-level, complex duties.

For instance, if you can automate permissions with an IAM solution like Crosswire, the time spent playing email tag with supervisors to get access could instead be spent refining that sales presentation or talking strategy with your team.

It’s crucial to make the most of what you have when you’re in a resource-constrained position, like the founder of a startup or the head of an under-budgeted department. You may not have the headcount or capital to just throw people or money at the problems you face, and automation is a great way to be clever about solving those problems.

This article covers five significant ways to improve your workflows and get more results than you would otherwise have the resources to.

1) Automate your agreements

This doesn’t even always require code; it just requires you to spend some time automating actions that you’ve already agreed to take.

For example, you can use Slack reminders to ping a channel when they need to write project updates (as shown above) or auto-send emails when candidates get to certain stages in your applicant tracking system. Anywhere that you or someone on your team agrees to do “X” where “X” is an action that will be repeated many times, automate that agreement. You can think of SLAs that you might be responsible for and try to ensure that you’ll maintain them automatically — if you have a 24 hr SLA on bug triage, consider automatically pinging your on-call to triage each new bug that shows up.

2) Push, don’t pull

Where possible, push data to those who need to act on that data. If you rely on people pulling data in order to act on it, that requires discipline and introduces human error.

It’s not necessarily the case that your team member doesn’t want to pull that hiring report and put it into the all-hands, but it’s one of 20 tasks they have to do, and it can slip through the cracks. If you can configure software to send the data to whoever needs it, you can mentally offload the task of needing to check that software at some cadence. This reduction in mental burden is a huge plus in a busy world.

3) Have your SaaS work together

Often, the apps you’re currently using have automation features that you’re not taking advantage of, especially cross-platform.

For example, take two programs you frequently use, like Okta and Amazon Web Services (AWS). You can automate the task of managing AWS entitlements with Okta Workflow’s “AWS IAM Identity Center Connector,” saving you time and making use of your infosec practices (Okta has a detailed post on how to set this up here). Similarly, Rippling has the feature “Workflow Automator” (shown above), a no-code tool allowing you to automate otherwise time-consuming actions like putting a new hire’s start date directly onto your Google Calendar or sending an automated email on the first of the month (Rippling has a detailed post on how to set this up here). All in all, your applications should not only work for and with you but with each other, and checking out cross-platform automation is a great start.

4) Streamline existing workflows

While fancy new widgets and workflows are exciting, often, the most productive way to automate your workplace is by making something you already do just a little bit more efficient.

Good candidates for streamlining include things that 1) take up a lot of time, 2) happen often, 3) are prone to human error, or 4) all of the above. If you can make a small Retool dashboard that will take a Google Sheet ID and automatically upload all your sales leads into Gem and Salesforce, you can save your SDRs time and errors from repetitive tasks. If you have a creative set of Zapier Zaps that allow your Calendly links to route candidates to the right job post and stage in your interview pipeline, you can cut out hours of error-checking and manual work for your recruiting team.

5) Automate with Crosswire

While Crosswire as a company automates itself using some of the above methods, there are also ways to automate with Crosswire’s IAM system itself.

With Crosswire, you can automatically qualify people for sensitive access under certain conditions, enable them to self-certify their access, and then have the access automatically expire after a few hours. Take, for instance, when there’s an active PagerDuty incident. This can be automatically linked to the #active-incident channel so that whenever someone is added to that channel, Crosswire can automatically make that person eligible to pull Prod DB logs from AWS (the person can also request access and be automatically provisioned access). After a few hours, Crosswire can then make sure the access is deprovisioned while recording a trail of all the events.

All in all, automation can seem drastic or daunting, but when reframed as a tool to cut down on the tasks that squander your and your employee’s time, you can utilize it as the productivity improvement it is.

For further guidance on automating and securing your organization, reach out to us! You can stay up to date with / join Crosswire below.