Name: How to Keep Your IT Job While Implementing Automation
Uploaded: 2026-02-25T21:20:04.332Z
Duration: 1 h 20 min 4 s
Description: How to Keep Your IT Job While Implementing Automation

Transcript for "How to Keep Your IT Job While Implementing Automation": Alright. Welcome everyone for joining us today. Super excited to have you all here. Wanna briefly set some expectations. We're gonna have a candid, practical conversation, regarding our topic, which is essentially how to work in IT when everything's being automated and keep your jobs and what parts of that process you can be a part of and how you can, you know, make it happen. I'm gonna give everybody, like, a minute or so to join. But while people are coming in, you know, welcome. Thank you. Love that you're here. Alright. Well, I see what those coming in. Oh, I see a lot of hanging out in the chat also. Definitely keep that chat information coming in. We are loving it. I have a whole team monitoring that for us to help elevate things for us to chat about. So keep those things coming. Hi out there. Love it. Alright. So first, let me start with the name of our little group today. How to keep your IT job while implementing automation. Alright. So this is gonna be, like, a talk between a a bunch of IT professionals, friends, and colleagues about, you know, how this interface our jobs over the last couple of years and time in life, and see how can I help you all out? So let me, start introducing everybody. I'm gonna just point to you all virtually, and you can take a minute or two or maybe fifteen seconds to tell me a little bit about yourself. First up, Alec Fasola. Hey, everyone. I'm Alec. I am a manager of corporate IT here at Rippling, actually. I've been with the company for three and a half years in a few different roles as Rippling's grown very, very quickly. But I'm excited to be here to talk with you all about automation and IT. Alright. Up next, Allen West. Hi, James. Pardon me. My name is Alan West. I'm a solutions engineer with Simply Deploy IT, a managed solutions consulting business based out of Boston. I'm based in Nashville. I've spent the last thirty years working with Apple in various enterprises and small businesses, and excited to talk about how automation really isn't gonna put you out of a job. It's just gonna make you a better person. And next, we have Nate Felton. Looking at Flywire currently as a senior client platform, engineer. I've been in the industry for twenty plus years as the the gray continues to come out in the beard on me here. But, likewise, I'm I'm all about automating as much as I can. I don't think it'll ever put me out of a job, but it'll certainly reduce my my stress load a little bit. So, hopefully, we can share some wisdom on that. Absolutely. And lastly, myself, I'm James Sorrenti. I'm a handle strategy and community here at Rippling IT. And I've been here about three months or so getting my hands dirty with product and people, making sure I can help people out. But before that, I spent years and decades, doing all the different kinds of IT, Bolton leadership management support, and and what have you. And whenever I could, automating those bits I didn't wanna do so I wouldn't have to do them. So let's get to it. Alright. So I'm gonna kind of give a framing for each little area, and I'll pass the questions around to everybody. But this is a more of an informal chat. So, while there might be some structure as I begin, the more we interact with each other, the more conversational it can become. But I will give a structure so that we can get into it. So first, essentially naming that fear out loud. So when IT professionals hear the word automation, what fear immediately comes up? Let's start with Alec. Yeah. I think automation, you know, gets thrown around a lot as as a buzzword and, maybe kind of a boogeyman in some cases. You know, people have this instinct of, like, it's coming to steal your job. Right? And I think often that comes from this framing as, like, a a cost cutting measure. You know, I think everyone has heard, you know, if we can automate more things, we need less people to do those things. And I don't think that's quite how it works, which is what we're here to talk about today, but I think that instinct is is very natural of, you know, the the powers that be say this is gonna cut costs and and that means my job. I think that's the the most common fear. Same question to you, Alan. Yeah. I I think that in some cases, people think that automation means that they have less autonomy and less things for them to do. So it's a a wage, once again, to take someone who has a lot of responsibilities and minimize those responsibilities. So once again, the fear plays into they're taking things away from me by automating, so that's going to make me less valuable. That's going to maybe put my job on the chopping block. And, you know, I sometimes it's a rational fear, but the majority of the time, it's an it's an irrational fear. You know, I like it being irrational. That's I I get it. I definitely heard many people express those fears to me over time. Nate, what's your take on this? So I I echo what everyone else has already said, but one thing that I I've seen before is people take a request to automate something as more of a, well, maybe they don't think I'm doing it correctly as a human. You know? You know? Maybe I've introduced too many errors, and they're looking for automation because I've done it wrong or something like that. And I think that sometimes and, again, irrational fear that comes to mind is, you know, why there's not enough why are they asking me to automate it, or or why should I avoid automating it. And I think sometimes it's literally just to to make it more streamlined and to free up your time to work on more important things than than some of the other things that are going on. Yeah. And if I can jump. in on and add something. to to Nate's initial comment about feeling like I've been doing it wrong or someone thinks I've been doing things wrong or not in a proper way, that also plays into that impostor syndrome that we all have or all experience at some point in our career. And which, again, then plays into that irrational fear of, well, if I'm doing it wrong, then maybe they're looking to cut me. And, you know, once again, that that that snowball effect of fear and and anxiety, which then does cause you to maybe make a mistake because you're so worried about all these other things that you shouldn't have to worry about that automation should help free you from. I mean I mean, that you really had nailed it spot on there. But there were some points that came up between what you were saying was about the. things we're choosing to automate, the things people are asking us to automate, and, like, how those tasks become, you know, a drive or automation. So there's a fear involved. How does it show up differently for leaders versus practitioners? Us I mean, the people doing the tech work, you know, practitioners here and the leaders, the ones who have to manage those techs or make these choices. Alex, do you have anything on that one? Yeah, it's interesting. I think often who's kind of leading the automation initiative is an important question. When it's this kind of vague mandate from above of automate things. You know, that can that can kinda start that snowball that that Alan was talking about. Whereas there are other, you know, ways to phrase it where if if the IT, you know, practitioners, the people who are actually kind of doing this kind of work have some type of leadership role or are considered as, like, the experts for this tool, you know, that's a really different framing and can actually more, you know, empower and encourage IT folks to to lean into automation. Right? That framing and kinda who's responsible is a a big part of how how you, you perceive it. Alan, Nate, any more thoughts on that frame that framing of it? Like, something that's kinda near and dear to me recently is there's actually a bit of a, glue that happens between automation and integration. And and for us, it's been how to integrate different systems together and enable automation between those systems. Because going kinda back to the again, automation putting me out of a job, it's not always necessarily the IT folks that may be concerned about their job. It's the other folks that were automating their business processes. So I think there's also that aspect of it. But, again, out of all the integrations and automations I've I've dealt with over the years, no one's ever lost a job because of the automation. If anything, it's just, you know, I've seen the comments and chat about it. It is really about the repetitive tasks and maybe removing some human error from it and stuff like that. Because at the end of the day, no one should need to log in to one system, download a PDF or a CSV just to log in to another system to upload a PDF or a CSV. Like, those are simple automations that the system should just be integrated into itself. I mean, I think diving deeper into why it feels like a threat is a great jumping off point from this because the threats might come from leadership. The threats might come from your own personal psyche or just in general. But we're all working tech related roles, here. Does automation feel more threatening in IT than other functions? I know, Nate, you said that other functions might be at risk, but I know the fear lives here a lot. Yeah. I think, you know, IT work is often kind of a thankless job. I I think a lot of us are used to being a little behind the scenes, you know, in in a lot of organizations. When IT is working well, you're kind of invisible to some people. Right? And I think the that's not necessarily a bad thing. But when, automation is then brought up as a way to, you know, make that work seem less valuable or less visible, I think that can feel really threatening, right, when you're you're already kind of, like, behind the scenes. Yeah. I think that's a big part of it. And, you know, like I said earlier, it's also not uncommon for there to not really be any clear sense of ownership or, like, direction when IT is brought up. And I think that can feel very threatening as well. Yeah. Definitely that. And a lot of a lot of IT, in in every level, there is a lot of repetitive work that is done, whether. it's, you know, the help desk where you're they're doing password resets or, you know, at the MDM level where you're early early in my career, we were, you know, imaging machines. We didn't have, you know, you know, what we have today. So there was a lot of repetitive work. And because there's a lot of repetitive work to be done, when people see that automation come come in and replace that repetitive work, they're like, okay. Well, now what do I do? Or they think that someone will come in and say, well, you used to you used to, you know, image machines by hand, and now we have automatic device enrollment and and zero touch enrollment. So now, you know, you're no longer useful because there's no other work for here for you to do. It's like, no. There are other things for me to do. It's just in different areas. So I I think that's where some of that fear plays out as well. This actually brings up a a recent conversation I had with a colleague about job fulfillment as well because, like, you brought up password reset, so that's kinda what I I focused on is, you know, I've got a tier one guy who's looking to not be a tier one guy for his entire life. And how does he get to a point where he can expand his skill set to get to, you know, tier two or tier three? And I think that's a good point right there is when we automate some simple tasks, like, say, password resets, that frees up our time to do other things that kinda get forgotten, like the soft skills or professional development and stuff like that. Like, that gives them an extra hour or two a day to maybe go take a course or or work on a certification to to grow themselves into, you know, the next chapter of their career. So your your employees get to improve themselves, feel better being there, and probably stay with you longer and give you more value while they're there. Yeah. I also like to touch I think one of the reasons why there's more fear in the IT space is because we're the ones that do the automating. Like, I enjoy automating stuff. It's a fun thing. I'm sure we'll have some enjoyment. Like, it's almost like a challenge to do it sometimes. But because we know something's technically possible to be automated, and if you look at that's the thing we're doing, It's like, we know there's a process to make that task go away. But our job isn't just the task we do. It's what we bring to the table. But, like, automation, like, actually changes work. Right? It doesn't change the value. Right? The things we're doing, there's still a value to what we bring. But what goes away? Next question. What parts of IT work does automation actually remove? Alan, we'll start here. Yeah. That that that busy work that, you know, takes up a good portion of my morning running reports and being able being able to automate a report out of out of an MDM and send it to managers, directors, other teams. So, you know, hey. We need the help desk to know how many password resets, we did through self-service this week, so that they can, you know, maybe look at there's something else going on. Those areas are are are my big thing. And and the others? Alec, what what do I let me know when I'm ripping land. Yeah, I mean, think folks have mentioned it in the chat as well, like it's best suited for those repetitive tasks, things you're doing every day that you don't need to be spending time doing. You know, there are a lot of that kind of concept of freeing you up to do you know, spend your time on other things. Right? An example that comes comes to mind for me kinda early in my career, I was at a a small start up. One of my first tasks when I started was enroll these devices in an MDM, figure out which one, enroll these devices. Oh, and it's a remote company, and they're all engineers who have had unmanaged devices for, you know, the the as long as they've been there. No one wanted to install the MDM. Right? I had to figure out how to do it, how to do it remotely, and how to do it in a way that didn't rely on me sending a 100 Slack messages every day saying, hey. Did you enroll your computer? And so I took a step back and and thought about how can I automate this? How can I use the tools I have at my disposal to make this easier for me so that I can spend my time on, you know, the long list of other things that I I need to do? Long story short, I I decided to, you know, take a little bit of time to learn Python, which I didn't know much about. I learned enough to, you know, copy and paste some things from Stack Exchange together and, make a a little Lambda job that would help me. It would pull my list of people from the MDM, pull a list of employees, and then send some Slack messages. It would tell me, you know, hey. This many people haven't enrolled, and it would message all of them and say, hey. You need to enroll your computer. Took me some time to learn. But after I did that project, I now had all these new tools that I could use as new tasks came up and new things needed to be rolled out and tracked. I suddenly had this new, you know, toolset that I could use that I didn't have before. And there was not free time. You know? By automating that thing, I didn't have nothing to do. I had, you know, lots of other things to do and ways to do them more efficiently. Interesting, you know, example from from long ago, but I think, you know, back on that role. And it would have been very different if I didn't make that decision to learn these tools early on and and kind of expand that toolkit. kinda like instead of take your time to learn through outside sources, your actual process of going through this made you learn the things. Nate, you were saying? was just gonna say, like, one of the things I I for some reason, I always tie automation and integration together. But, like, one of the things that. has helped me again recently is I'm trying to get better at role based access, Again, trying to reduce tickets and stuff. How many requests do we get? Oh, I need access to this system or this system. So some of the automations we've been doing is around role based access where if you are in the engineering department, say, you get the engineering level access. If you're, you know, on the people team, you get the people team access. So things like that, like automating those connections of of you who you are, what department you're a part of, you know, what org structure you're in, and stuff like that so that I don't have to close four tickets a week or, you know, four tickets an hour, really, for access requests, especially at onboarding time. Like, that's probably there's been a a few things in here about simple use cases or maybe, like, quick examples. And probably the first one I would point out, honestly, is is onboardings and offboarding. Those are probably the number one thing I would recommend people automate because they are so easy to forget one little checkbox somewhere, especially if you don't actually have it documented what that checkbox should be. But it's the more you can automate your onboardings and offboardings, it it definitely frees up a lot of your time and eliminates a lot of those repetitive tasks and tickets. Yeah. And and I would I would add to that in addition to onboarding and offboarding, especially in environments where everyone is not an admin, being able to automate privilege escalation and being able to pull reporting around privilege escalation. Mhmm. I that for me was was something when I worked in an environment where we had to pull back admin rights. One of the things we were asked to do was figure out, well, when we pull it away, we're gonna get a lot of pushback. What what is gonna be a way that they can do it where we're not they're not calling the help desk, We're not sending someone out to the to desk side. And we automated it using, you know, tools from, that someone at one of the MDM vendors had written specifically for their platform. And then later on, SAP wrote a really, really wonderful piece of technology, you know, called privileges and, privileges too now that, essentially took that, that script that we were using and allowed us to use it in multiple MDMs. So for us, that was and that was seen as a as a win not only from our side, but also from from areas like management and HR because we could, do things like, include a file of what they were doing, what what what they asked for, what they did, and was it what they what they said. Yeah. Maybe the last thing I would add here, to kind of piggyback off of both. of those, is Nate was talking about access control and kind of using predefined roles, role based access to save time and efficiency. And Alan was talking about, you know, privileged desktop access. I think something that kind of lives underneath both of those is security and compliance. And not only does, you know, kind of automating your provisioning of new hires and and not having to do access requests save you time, it's also way more secure. Right? If people are having to do access requests for every single application, there's gonna be mistakes. People are going to get added to systems they shouldn't or not be added to systems they should. And sometimes that paper trail is hard to follow. Whereas when you can automate your provisioning and say, this person's joining, here's the role that they're in, all their access is automatically provisioned for them, the security risk is so much lower when those roles are kind of predefined like that. Yeah. And I think you work with a oh, sorry, got. it. Yeah. But if you if you work and especially if you work with a lot of developers, because developers are always jumping new tools in and new tools out, You know? And some of the tools are you know, they're getting off of GitHub. Some of them are internal, and some of them, you know, you're not exactly sure where the toolset is coming from. And so having open admin access on those types of boxes without any type of reporting, Yeah. leaves you open to, once again, security issues. So we don't just let a robot or, like, a lobster take a very tired computer when I do stuff for you? That's? no. Not yet. So there sorry. But there are some interesting things being pulled out of this. Like, there's a certain repetitive nature of tasks we're trying to get rid of. Right? But it's also a repetitive nature of tasks that are being automated. And there's kind of, like, a a benefit that's being, like, stated broadly here is that by automating your repetitive tasks, it isn't just about making your test go away, which is definitely a big positive use case for me. But, also, it's that it gets done the same way each time. Like, every. time, like, a new user is onboarded, the schema for their name or their email address is always gonna be the same. You're doing computer naming, naming the same thing. The way their group memberships are assigned, like, all those bits when they're offboarding, like, access leaves at what point in time, removing licenses after they're offboarded, not just access. Like, all those bits are are tasks that are all easy to do. But you have to stage them out over time and do them and do them each time or else you have security or financial risks for not doing them. So it's kind of a value you're adding for the company by doing these, tasks. Maybe how else could automation changes like, how IT could add value to the business? I mean, I'm Alec. I. think Nadia, I wanna I wanna just call him in. No. I you know, we've been talking a lot about kind of automation in the context of IT, and I think that's normal. You know, if you're learning a new skill or a new tool, you're gonna start with the things that impact you on a day to day basis. Right? I think taking it a few steps down the road, right, if you are in a company that has a good kind of automation practices and and, you know, priorities, at a certain point, you move from just automating your own stuff to the broader company. Right? You know, Nate mentioned earlier automations and integrations between different systems. You know, to me, that's where this kind of goes from I'm helping myself and my team to I'm, you know, providing value to the whole company is saying, you know, here's what we were able to do within IT. You know, we now automate this percentage of, you know, requests that come our way. Imagine what we could do for finance or HR or legal or different teams that have similar kind of request based workflows, things where people need something from that team. You know, a lot of the concepts apply outside of just the IT world. And when you're working from kind of a the same platform using the same tools, it's really easy to then kind of almost become like a, you know, a strategic type of leader within the company of saying, hey. Have you thought about connecting these systems and automating this task that you're doing? You know, there's there's so much value once you kind of expand outside of the IT world. Any other thoughts about moving IT from a cost center to a value add, Nate or Alan? I and for sure, there's again, the integration aspect motivation. of right. Yeah. Like, integration is because of automation. Like, you write these tools that like, effectively, you're you're saving the company time and resources. And, like, I think that's the fear, though, is right. The fear is if you do these automations, my job is eliminated, but which is definitely a fear, but I've seen the the good side of that, right, where we've freed up the time in the company, and that has allowed us to take the company to the next level. And every industry and every company is gonna be a little bit different, but for us, at least, that's been the case is the automation we can do with the repetitive and annoying tasks has allowed us to to take our company to the next level. And I think that's, you know, essentially what you're you're trying to point out is automation can help improve our business, improve our lives, and and help take everything to the next level, not only our careers and our our personal kind of feelings about making things better, I guess. But, Right. yeah, I think just in general, automation can can help your take your entire business to the next level because you're removing repetitive tasks, removing some human error, and and just freeing up time to do new stuff. No. That that's yeah. Great. I know we have some business leaders that have joined, like, that are in the audience today. I wanna make sure that they know that they're gonna get value out of having us do our jobs better. Right? So. I want to make sure we've touched on those points. Alright. Well, Yeah. There's of IT leaders oh, good. No. Keep going. I I was just I I saw a couple of things about, you know, how how to get started or, you know, how to how to break into automation. And and one of the things someone earlier in the chat actually called out a home home assistant, which I'm also a a fellow home assistant user at home. So. for anyone who's interested in such a thing, they're you you can do automation at home. If you're afraid of automating yourself out of a job, you can at least, you know, automate yourself out of repetitive tasks in your own house. So one thing I wanted to call out is I don't even know what to call it. I call it NAN, NodeMation. It there's an open source version of this tool out there that allows you they call it no code, low code. Right? And I think that's where the the break into automation really can come for some of the the newer people coming into this career is, you know, ten, twenty years ago, you had to actually write some code to do some automations and integrations. Whereas nowadays, there's tools like Notemation that can get you started to do these automations through visual UI workflows and and stuff like that. And you just link a couple APIs together and make things talk to each other. You know, Home Assistant is another great example of, like, it just kind of built in. You can connect different sensors to do different automations and and tasks and stuff like that. So that'd probably be a a good breaking point or break in point for for. folks started. And then you can eventually work your way up to the larger platforms like Workato is a big one. But, yeah, there's a lot of low code, no code options out there that, you know, would help with automation that doesn't require knowing a programming language. Yeah. I'm gonna expand this category because it's actually a good, like, discussion point. Generally, how do you gain these skill sets so you can then apply them to your jobs? And then how do you you know, ideally, well, then you'll be get other jobs because you've gained these skill sets. Right? So I'm a huge proponent proponent of, like, home labbing in general. Like, find that, in work, you know, you don't wanna do everything in production because you might break real stuff. Right? But at home, you can kind of have some more fun with stuff. I was talking to someone about this recently. I'm like, well, how did you learn how to do this or that or whatever? Right? So I wanted to learn more about Docker. So what did I do? I built my actually, I a home assistant server on on, like, actually, right off the little Chromebox. Right? So I have home assistant running there, and that way it makes for fun, like, automated things from my home. And then got, like, Docker running for a media server, other things. And I'm using Portainer. Yes. I love it. Oh, my props, man. So these little things that we do, I learned so much about, like like, how, like, Linux works from doing retro video games. Like, I learned because I didn't have to just play with it. I wasn't just using my mouse and then doing clicking at things. I had to make things work. I was in the command line all day. I need remote access to stuff, so I started using Tailscale and accessing networks remotely and, like but all the little bits start fitting together, like, for real work. Stacks of Docker containers talking to each other through Telescale networks with Linux boxes. And, you know, maybe not my home assistant stuff, but was just fun. But, like, all those things, those skill sets tied together for actual real technical work stuff that turned to automation side we've done. Who else has? Alan, do you have any thoughts on this point? Oops. I'm. sure you do. Yeah. Yeah. I I I've I've got a I've got a a fairly fairly elaborate smart home that I keep on adding to, much to my my wife's sometimes dissuccessment. But, yeah, home labbing is is one thing, and, somebody in the in the chat, Cesar mentioned, n a n, is a great way to start, learning low code, no code. I also think, you know, when you're looking and this is something Nate brought up, you know, a discussion he had with a tier one person going, how do I get myself off the help desk? I think bringing people like that in and teaching them basic automations. Hey. We're gonna automate this small process. If anybody's interested, we would love for you to learn while we do. I I did a lot of in in my corporate my corporate days, I did a lot of lunch and learns where we would have people come in from the help desk, from other teams, from other parts of the company when we would do something over lunch. You know, we're gonna automate ServiceNow so that people can put in tickets automatically from their machine, and it's gonna pull all their information, you know, things like that. And so doing those types of things, taking an interest in your tier one people Mhmm. and upscaling them because what what are we always looking for? We're always looking for really good, smart, talented people to bring further up the IT chain on onto our different teams. And finding out what those tier one people wanna do and helping them get there is is influence beyond measure within your organization. You wanna be influential influential in your organization, take an interest in in your juniors, upskill them, and send them out throughout your company. You will have more influence than you know what to do with. I mean well, let's expand on that. Like, what skill and mindset should we be in instilling across the board to you know, with the automation, like, know, this framework in mind. Right? What skills around that and mindsets should we be fostering in our next generation of IT tech? I. I think it's a it's a great question to think about, like, separate from specific technologies. Right? You know, I think there's a lot of just, like, skills and and ways that you can operate. If if I kinda put this in the frame set of, or mindset of, you know, Alan was saying, you have tier one people that are good, you should encourage them. Maybe you are that tier one person, or you're one of the people kind of doing those password reset type of emails or tickets today. You know, I think the things that are are most important are to to ask questions and and to kinda pay attention. Right? If you're saying, hey. We're kinda doing the same thing over and over and over. Let me go talk to my manager about what options we have to automate this thing. Maybe you don't know what tools you have or where to start, but asking the question is the place to start. If you've got, you know, four tier one people and one of them is coming to you and saying, hey. Keep doing this. Can we automate this? How can we make this better? That's the one that you wanna invest some time into. Right? And so I think part of it is just being curious, asking questions, trying to poke holes in, you know, why are we doing it this way? You know, just because we've always done it that way. Can we do it different? The worst words. I think that's Exactly. And. then maybe the the other thing I would say is, you know, a lot of this, especially as you kinda move up the chain, comes down to, you know, can you kind of talk through a a business problem, a workflow problem, and translate that to a technical thing and vice versa? You know, IT roles are often, like we were talking about earlier, a little bit in the shadows or behind the scenes. Right? And and you gotta talk to people. You gotta be able to explain how some automation works to a finance person that doesn't know anything about automation. I think that's a really critical, really critical skill as well. Yeah. We talk in business all all the time, and it's become, very important in IT is our metrics. What are the metrics in what we do, and how are those how are those metrics used to contribute to the company's success. Hello? And being able to say, hey. I took an automation. I re retooled a process and automated it and saved the company a thousand hours this year, making sure that your leaders, your leader's leader, you know, and and and all the way up, you know, even as far as up to a CEO's office knows that the work that's being done isn't silent. It's it's making impact, how it's the impact. And, you know, that's that's not only the job of the person doing the automation. It's also the job of of the leaders. A good leader will make sure that that everyone above him knows the incredible work that his team is doing regardless of how silent it is. Yeah. Totally. One of the one of the things I actually love doing about a year or two ago is try not to use too many product names here, but auto package is a huge thing that I use all the time. Right? So I actually sat there, and I took one of the easiest packages it takes to to package and deploy, which is, you know, Google Chrome or Firefox. I sat there and I just timed myself. If I didn't have an automation grabbing the latest version of Chrome and and deploying it to my systems all the time, how much would that how much time would that take me to do it by hand? So I sat there and I I clocked myself kinda thing, and I I forget the numbers, but let's say it took me five minutes to do it. Right? And the number of times Chrome updates in a month, I think we're up to almost weekly at this point, so four times a month. So twenty minutes a month, I'm saving by having that one task automated. You multiply that by forty, fifty different applications, and the numbers really show. So that's actually one of the things I've done recently is a lot of our automations end up creating Jira tasks. So at the point one point, what I was doing is literally every month, I would take a report of all those Jira tasks that got handled in a month, multiply them by five essentially, and said, this is how much time I saved our team this month by not having to package all the software by hand. And I I think that's a huge thing is is being able to report up. Like, yes, we automated these things, but here's the here's how much time that saved us and and so that you can see that the time I spent working on this automation isn't for nothing. And now here, we get to see the continued benefits of that automation. They're first showing the value of you and your team. That makes sure people are doing the work. To by doing the work to show the impact you're doing, which is important. Like, often, again, we're silent warriors, and we just want problems to go away. But when, Alan was saying it very well very early on, like, when there's no problems, they blame IT also because, like, why are you here? Why do you think there's no problems? It's kind of part of the job. But so let me think. Alright. Is there any other ways you think people can, like, you know, build that wall around themselves? I don't mean, like, you know, making it so, like, you're irreplaceable because no one will have to do your work. Obviously, document your tasks. Right? But what makes you invaluable? What skills do people build up to make sure that, you know, their job prospects are, you know, ever hurting? So to that point, I I think there's a fear that if I automate my job too well, they'll think they don't need me anymore. And taking away the fact that, like, automation still needs care and feeding and monitoring and stuff like that. But, again, I've seen it go the other way of, like, I automated one or two little things over here, and next thing you know, I have requests to automate these bigger things over here instead. So it's actually me I've made a bigger problem for myself because now I need to go do even more work because I actually got good at automating things. Right? So that's the other side of that coin, right, is if you get good enough at it, instead of trying to get rid of you, they're gonna give you bigger problems to try to automate away instead. Sounds really fun. I've been I've had I wear that, that that on my shoulders at times. Like, you take a little Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet or whatever. You make something get a little bit easier. And then someone else, oh, you know how to do this thing. And then you do that one step further. Then you integrate it with something else. Like, oh, you know this other system. And I'm like, oh, yes. Well, yeah. And then it just it snowballs, snowballs, snowballs, and then you become, you're on community for IT. I don't know. It just things happen over time. You you any other thoughts on on on that framing from any else in the battle? Any maze? Well, let's see. I'm going to move to the next section. We've gone through our major topic points. I wanna make sure we have time for the last bits to make sure we can get everything wrapped up. We do have time for some questions from the audience. And if there are any direct questions to each of the panelists from things we've said, definitely call it out. But, you know, I'm here for it, and I'm curious what's been elevated. I'm just checking the notes. Do alright. Well, there are some questions in here. I'm just finding them in the system. That's a me thing. I'll automate this next time. Don't you worry. Well, while we're doing that, let me see. Alright. I'm gonna move on to other parts, at least there are no formal questions asked in the q and a, not just in the stream of the chat. But if there are more questions, we're gonna be here. I mean, I know I'm on on LinkedIn as are most of the rest of you, and we'll be here to, you know, follow-up and have other questions and responses. Everyone here likes to chat. That's why they were chosen, and I'd love talking with them, which is why we're here. But let's see. One last question for my group here. If there's one thing you want people to take away from today, what is it? I'll just go back around in order. Al, you can start. I would say the the number one thing is don't don't be afraid of automation. You know, lean lean into it. There's only good things that can come from automating away the the little manual things and really opening up that toolbox that you have to to automate other tasks and and really, you know, become a a really valuable part of whatever organization or or business that you're in. Alan? I think learning automation actually opens up more opportunities to you, more pathways, different areas of your IT career. And so you shouldn't be afraid of it. You should actually embrace it, learn it, become really, really good at it because it will only serve you as you get, you know, you know, long in your career like someone like me. Yeah. Echo, all? of that. You. know, the automation in your career is great, but, you know, again, kinda going back to people wondering how to get started. Start with even your own personal stuff. Like, if you're afraid of automating yourself out of a job, automate yourself out of some home tasks. You know, if you happen to be on a Mac, I highly recommend doing the Shortcuts app. There's a entire community out there of premade Shortcuts, but it's very simple to to play around with them and build them yourselves and kinda learn again that low code, no code with within just the Shortcuts app. So I I don't think you would ever be wrong to learn automation either from a personal perspective or a career perspective. So I I definitely don't think automation should ever be feared. I think there's only growth to to be had with it. I have to agree, and I'm a big fan of that shortcuts app. I've got whole collection of things. I'll maybe I'll share some out once I, collect them, but there is a whole community sharing those bits so they can work together. So my lab my takeaway from it is to weaponize your laziness, like, automate those tasks away. Like, you know, we we like to be efficient with things. But right? But that whole laziness factor is like, no. We just don't wanna do that. We have lots of work to do. We have lots of work to do. So let's make the things we don't wanna do less of a part of that. Well, I'm gonna thank everyone here, who joined. We do have some more, things, for this session. We do have our giveaway, coming up at the end. But I wanna just thank the question to answer period for, you know, everyone who joined and chatted and talked about that. And, yeah, thank you three. And let's, say. I'm waiting for Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for the invite. awesome. It was great. Was so I'll see all of you. We don't see you in also. You you can stick around, but I just wanted to make sure that we got this part, taken care of. Alright. Let me oh, we have slides. Great. So I do lots of these events because this is, my job. So some ones that are coming up. First, we have, while longevity consulting ditched the selected IT systems for rippling. It's actually be, think, a really cool event with my friend Carter and Andy over at Longevity. It's coming up March 4. So if you can make it, come on down. And cool. Oh, I think me and someone else are clicking buttons. Let's see. We've automated this button pressing. I got it. So my beard isn't big enough for this one. But cocktails and career advice with the bearded IT guys. Bearded IT is a youth YouTube personnel you may already know, but he does a lot of conversations about people getting a leg up in their IT career. So check it out if you can, especially those who are curious about those parts. And we have women IT leading under pressure. Some amazing voices here. Do join this regardless of of who you are. Come join and support. And last, I may have mentioned this earlier, but we have rippling on the road coming up. I'll be in Chicago, March for the bunch of teams from IT and the regular, rippling product, bringing a lot about our product to the actual road. And I thought, what is Rippling IT? So there are some new faces out there. Not everybody comes to Rippling world. Very many of you aren't customers. And I get these questions a lot because I didn't know what Rippling IT was personally before I was, like, further along the process in my Rippling knowledge journey. So I'm gonna just go through it. Right? So Rippling, in general, has a mission to free up smart people so they can solve hard problems. Rippling IT is a platform of individual products that extend that mission to IT. So IT professionals, like, enable all those classic IT responsibilities, but inside of a platform. So it unites the management of identity, access, devices, your IDP, your MDM, you know, your inventory management, your all that stuff into one place, including a device store, so you can kind of have your entire employee life cycle flow through these processes. But the cool thing about it is it's all tied around that employee data. That's like the unit of Vedger that they used. It ripples out to everything else. So as that person comes on in and goes to different roles and and then leans, the rules, access, and things change, with that employee. Right? So, but, like, he knows and knows what devices the employee has, the software the employee should have access to, what apps should be installed, and throughout the entire life cycle and the employee. Oh, I'll see. Now now I don't know how the slides work. Thank you. My magic elbows back there. So throughout the entire life cycle, all the changes are clapped to everybody all based on this cold data layer, which, again, is the employee graph, which is how all our employees interact with each other and the things they have. And it goes to our our I'm or MDM and inventory products as shown above with automated compliance coming too, which I'm excited to talk about, but I can't yet. But awesome. Yes. You'll oh, we have a raffle winner. Hopefully, someone's told me who it is. Oh, they did. Great. So thank you all for coming here. But if your name is Cesar Talerone, from Raptive, the gift card is yours. We'll reach out to you to make sure you can, like, have it and use it. I assume you don't use the numbers on the screen because that would be bad. But, again, thank you everyone for coming out here. Congratulations, Caesar. And, you know, we'll be doing lots more of these. I do want you all to show up again and keep having fun. And if there's feedback, bring it to me. But thank you, everybody. Cool. Thanks for joining. I really did enjoy this conversation. Go automate stuff. Go work in your home labs. Go leg up your career, and go have fun out there. Alright.