A Note to Management About the Network Automation Journey – It’s About Culture

Most of the blog posts and information about network automation focus on the technical details and are directed toward the network engineers. There is more to the network automation transformation, however, than the technical aspects. In fact, one of the most important aspects of making the network automation transformation ‘stick’ is the cultural component. Network automation is a journey, and it does require a cultural shift throughout the organization, including engineering, management, and human resources (HR). Management needs to understand this cultural shift, so it can better enable the transformation and make it permanent.

The technology part of an automated infrastructure is a solved problem: we have the technology. Ultimately, it’s the cultural component that makes network automation successful in the long term.

This cultural shift, at its heart, means changing the expectations around how many people it should take to run a network, along with the skill sets the people have. In order for the automation transformation to keep long-term momentum, it must be supported by management: everyone, from the first-line manager, executive management, and all the way to Human Resources, must play a part to sustain the appropriate culture.

This article will cover several of the components around this cultural shift that management needs to be aware of.

Network automation entails a cultural shift that, at its heart, means changing the expectations around how many people it should take to run a network and the skill sets of those people.

Automated Infrastructure and High-Level Corporate Strategic Objectives

The cultural shift required to sustain an automated network infrastructure is organization-wide. From a management perspective, oftentimes the first question is: why should I automate? This is a valid question because management needs to understand how automation supports the company objectives: the more a given project supports very high-level objectives, the more likely it is to survive.

Part of the cultural shift involves understanding the strategic benefits provided by an automated network infrastructure. If a project or initiative supports high-level corporate objectives, it is more likely to have support. The good news is that automation ties in to several common high-level corporate strategic objectives. We discuss a few below.

Cashflow

Many firms have a high-level corporate objective to increase cash flow. A business is interested in executing as many value-generating workflows as possible because those workflows produce value and ultimately revenue. An automated infrastructure directly supports this high-level objective by allowing the business to:

• Execute revenue-generating workflows quicker, which brings in more revenue sooner.
  • This interval, between when something is sold versus when the revenue is realized, is often called the quote-to-cash interval.
  • Shrinking the quote-to-cash interval helps cashflow.
• Execute workflows with less friction, which leads to more workflows being executed, which leads to greater throughput and increased revenue.

Companies care about executing workflows quickly and without friction; when they do this, they minimize the quote-to-cash interval and increase the total amount of throughput, which increases cashflow.

Any initiative that can increase revenue and bring in revenue quicker tends to align with high-level strategic objectives and is highly valuable to a business.

Preserving Institutional Knowledge and Intellectual Property

Worker turnover happens everywhere and all the time. In the worst case, when an employee leaves, all their knowledge leaves with them.

With an automated infrastructure, even when a person leaves, they leave behind a lot of their knowledge, enshrined in the automation infrastructure.

However, when an automated infrastructure is in place, at least some of that employee’s knowledge remains, enshrined in the automation infrastructure. This increases efficiency and stability in the firm because an automated infrastructure allows consistent workflows to continue, even when a person leaves. Additionally, training new hires requires less time: the workflow process is enforced in the automation, so there are less manual tasks to learn, execute, and document, and thus fewer opportunities to make rookie mistakes.

Increase Employee Satisfaction by Allowing Engineers to Engineer!

Another common high-level corporate objective is employee retention and satisfaction. For a moment, imagine your network engineers freed from high-volume, low-value intensive tasks. For example, many highly skilled network engineers are often relegated to perform tasks such as

• OS upgrades
• Spending a lot of time manually parsing and comparing pre- and post-check data on network devices in change windows
• Interacting with multiple systems and windows on their computer to find the device/interface that holds a specific IP address
• Manually parsing maintenance notifications from multiple vendors in multiple formats

These types of tasks are well below the engineers’ skill set, but network engineers are often called upon to perform these tasks simply because they understand the technology and full context around the task. In addition to being below the skill set of a network engineer, a lot of these tasks also happen to be tasks that machines are great at.

Relieving your network engineers from repetitive, high-volume tasks that are below their skill set will improve employee satisfaction.

An automated infrastructure can perform these tasks and give engineers the time to use their high-level skills. This benefits the company because their employees are much happier; it also benefits the engineers because it allows them to exercise high-level skills that add more value.

Making the case to upper management about network automation should include the fact that automating away high-volume, repetitive tasks will allow your engineers to actually engineer, and increase their job satisfaction.

The Engineers’ Daily Tasks Will Change Dramatically

One of the most striking examples of daily tasks changing in an automated environment is configuration management: instead of manually configuring devices at the CLI, network engineers will transition to maintaining configuration templates. This is a great example of the power of abstraction: instead of trying to manage the configs on hundreds or even thousands of devices, the engineer will design and maintain a relatively small amount of configuration templates, and then use those templates to deploy consistent configurations to the many devices. So, your expectations around how your engineers spend their time will also have to change:

• They will spend time on tasks such as templating, coding, etc. to automate away low-value tasks
• They will spend more time on higher-level network engineering

An automated infrastructure means that managers cannot continue to measure and task their engineers the same way they did under a manual regime.

It will be important that you measure and task your engineers on what they should be doing to support an automated network infrastructure, not on how they were doing things under a manual regime. It’s important that all levels of management refine their objectives to support the new needs that accompany network automation.

With a New Skill Set Come New Pay Expectations

Imagine you’ve made the transformation, and you are now running an automated network infrastructure. Your engineers are now fully on their way to being network automation engineers and have embraced their new skill sets to make your network and company more efficient. The expectation that comes with a new, highly valuable skill set is increased compensation: the market demands it. The average salary per engineer will go up, but the payoff here is that each engineer is:

• More productive (see the Daily Tasks section above) because they maintain and leverage an automated infrastructure that amplifies their productivity
• Performing or enabling higher-level network engineering tasks

With a valuable skill set comes changing expectations around compensating those individuals.

Each engineer will enable more throughput, increasing general productivity. With this, you will need to compensate them accordingly. Educating HR about this change is critical in this process and emphasizes the fact that an automated infrastructure must be accompanied by an organization-wide cultural change.

Some of Your Engineers Won’t Want to Come Along

The CLI-to-template transition is one of many cultural shifts that comes along with an automated network infrastructure. As with any cultural shift, there will likely be resistance among some engineers who see this as a threat to their jobs, skill sets, certifications, etc. This resistance can manifest itself in several forms:

• Refusal/resistance to building/maintaining the automation infrastructure
• Manually configuring devices
• Not attending automation training
• Sowing discord among peers
• Etc.

Educating network engineers on the benefits of running and maintaining an automated infrastructure is necessary to ease cultural resistance to automation.

How do you combat this cultural resistance? Educating network engineers on the benefits of an automated infrastructure is a start: pointing out the benefits, such as not having to do a lot of high-volume, low-value tasks that are beneath their skill set is one distinct advantage. Other benefits include a new, marketable skill set, higher pay, relief from low-skill tasks, etc.

As for the vendor certs they may have earned: an automated infrastructure gives them the time to actually use the high-value engineering skills they acquired in those certs, versus simply ‘being good at the CLI’.

Technical training for the engineering staff is also important: making sure the network engineers have the right skill sets (Python, Ansible, Nornir, Jinja, JSON, etc) to operate and improve the automation goes a long way toward resolving the fears of the unknown.

Giving network engineers the appropriate skill set is a requirement and can help ease apprehension about and resistance to the move to an automated infrastructure.

It will be important to understand that this is a huge change for your engineering staff, so you will have to be patient and educate them on why these changes are needed and how they benefit the engineers. In addition, it may be necessary to provide multiple opportunities for technical training so, as fears and resistance subside, the engineers have the chance to get on board and learn how to operate in the new environment. Some resistance may subside after training and time, but for some, it may not. In the end, there must be a good cultural fit going forward.