By Jeff Gray, CEO & Co-Founder, Gluware
Digital transformation initiatives such as standardizing multi-site operations, accelerating product deployments, or scaling to new markets often share a common challenge: they overestimate their organization’s network’s agility. Unfortunately, the impact of that overestimation isn’t felt until the initiative is already underway.
Consider a retail company planning to standardize network operations across 200+ locations to improve security, ensure compliance, and accelerate service deployments. The business case is compelling, leadership is aligned, and the 18-month timeline seems reasonable.
However, six months into execution, manual operations are creating bottlenecks at every turn. Configuration changes require weeks of coordination and policy updates can’t be validated consistently across sites.
This isn’t a failure of strategy or commitment. It’s what happens when plans overestimate the agility and velocity of their network operations – and when questions about operational readiness are asked too late.
It’s Not a Resource Problem
Here’s what many organizations are working with: a patchwork of multiple vendors, manual processes, homegrown scripts, and operational knowledge that exists primarily in the heads of a few key people. It’s not surprising that this operational foundation can’t deliver the pace, scale, or consistency that digital transformation initiatives require.
When these constraints become apparent in the middle of a transformation initiative, the initial response is often to add resources. Larger teams and more hours. Extended timelines and ballooning budgets.
But scaling manual network operations doesn’t solve the fundamental problem, it simply distributes it across more people. Configurations still drift and changes still take time to coordinate and validate across sites. Meanwhile, your network is carrying revenue, supporting customers, and enabling operations every hour of every day. The transformation can’t wait for teams to scale up and get trained.
This is where strategic plans begin to stall: in the gap between manual operations and the execution capacity transformation actually demands.
Building Operational Capacity for Transformation
Organizations don’t need to throw more resources at manual operations. The answer is intelligent network automation that amplifies what existing teams can accomplish without proportionally scaling headcount.
Intelligent network automation builds on current operations rather than requiring organizations to staff up or start over. It works with the tooling, technologies, and automation teams are already using, adding capabilities that extend what’s possible without proportionally scaling headcount.
This creates an evolutionary path: manual and semi-automated operations get augmented with intelligent automation, progressing toward networks that can operate with increasing independence and adaptability. Organizations build the operational capacity their transformation timelines require without the overhead of continuously expanding teams.
One Gluware customer described how this approach addressed “critical business challenges facing our current brownfield architecture faster and with higher resolution than we’ve had before…an achievement that might have previously taken years.”
Once the foundation is in place, execution capacity accelerates rapidly and without requiring teams to grow at the same pace as the infrastructure.
Asking the Right Questions at the Right Time
The difference between transformation initiatives that stay on schedule and those that stall often comes down to when organizations conduct a clear-eyed assessment of their network operations. Your transformation plan defines the destination and the timeline, but your network agility ultimately determines whether that timeline is realistic.
Critically, that assessment needs to happen during planning and not six months into implementation. The questions to ask are straightforward: Can we execute the network changes this transformation requires at the necessary pace? What’s the gap between our current capabilities and what the timeline demands? How do we close that gap without simply adding more people to manual processes?
Organizations that ask these questions early build execution capacity proactively. Those that discover operational constraints after committing to timelines face delays, budget overruns, or the need to scale back their original goals.
To learn more about how intelligent network automation can support your digital transformation goals, visit us at https://gluware.com/
