OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced its development of the industry's first technology that estimates the number of development work-hours needed to automate systems operations, enabling assessment of the cost effectiveness of such automation work to be generated in a short period of time.

The process of automating operations involves developing operations-task components so that individual operations can be automated, and creating workflows to control them. Ordinarily, work-hours are estimated based on descriptions of tasks in an operations manual, but when a single operations-task component appears in several descriptions or there are procedures in common, it is difficult to properly estimate the number of operations-task components requiring development and the length of the workflow, which hinders the accuracy of the estimate for development work-hours.

Fujitsu has developed a technology that accurately estimates the number of work-hours needed to develop operations-task components, by estimating the number of operations-task components based on type-identifying rules derived from approximately 1,300 patterns of task descriptions, and applying estimated development work-hours for each operations-task component. Another technology automatically extracts sections that can be split off into subroutines and estimates the length of the workflow, in order to evaluate the number of development work-hours. Combined, for systems operations involving more than 1,000 tasks that are candidates for automation, these technologies can provide a rough estimate of development work-hours in roughly five days, whereas before this process took more than a month.

This technology enables easy calculation of cost effectiveness based on the number of development work-hours and the operations task work-hours that will be obviated by automation, so that deployment plans can be devised more quickly and with overall efficacy in mind by, for example, first applying automation to tasks offering the highest cost benefit.

Details of this technology are being presented at the Workshop on Advanced IT Service Management (BDIM 2015), opening May 15 in Ottawa, Canada.

Business systems are evolving into more diverse forms to adapt to specific needs, including server consolidation, redundancy between sites for disaster mitigation, and operations run on private clouds. When running operations in the cloud, for example, there are operational tasks specific to the cloud for configuring and managing resources, but the general trend in operations management is to reduce costs. To automate operational tasks that had been done by hand to achieve both a reduction in operational costs and a reduction in operator errors, and thereby improve the quality of operations, Fujitsu Laboratories in 2014 developed a technology that analyzes operating procedures in an operations manual to present candidates for automation from among the operational tasks in it.