In any infrastructure team’s automation journey, there comes a point when they must seek sponsorship and investment to take the automation initiative from departmental hobby to broader business impact.
Gaining that investment is a matter of numbers, yes, but to an even larger degree, it’s a matter of gaining trust.
Trust isn’t just about technical know-how—it’s about establishing credibility for your team’s expertise, your business case, and your ability to deliver solutions.
In this post, we’ll explore some crucial elements of building that trust so the odds may be “ever in your favor.” 😉
. . . . .
Not just how, but when
I’ve always loved the saying, “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”
Start building trust before you need investment. Why? Because the stakeholders who decide on that investment may not:
- Understand networking’s impact on the business outcomes
- Recognize the unique challenges and opportunities facing the networking team
- How automation can help
This means you’ll need to:
- Engage stakeholders
- Demonstrate business and technical expertise
- Showcase business-focused goals and wins
This takes time. Start now.
. . . . .
Tell a value story tied to your business
All business value falls into three categories: increasing revenue, saving through efficiency, or reducing risk. Rank these drivers for your organization and focus first on the most important one.
Let’s unpack these drivers further:
- Revenue: If your organization offers any type of connectivity-dependent service that generates the majority of revenue (cloud, SaaS, gaming, streaming, network services, real-time analytics, datacenter services, etc), then the most significant benefit that automation brings is improving network performance and stability that increases revenue by maximizing user experience and minimizing disruptions.
- Efficiency: If your organization primarily uses its networks to enable the productivity of employees or facilities, the primary benefit that automation brings is saving money through operational efficiency.
If the business is growing, automation means a network team can handle more business growth without increasing headcount. It also means a faster time to deploy new revenue-generating sites or productivity-enhancing applications.
Finally, greater automation leads to a reduction in downtime and lost productivity by increasing provisioning accuracy, avoiding errors, and faster mean time to repair. - Risk: If your organization needs to be careful about complying with various regulatory requirements, especially those that apply directly to IT infrastructure (such as NERC-CIP for North American electrical utilities), then automation can reduce the risk of costly non-compliance fines by increasing consistency of policy-compliant actions.
. . . . .
Gain sponsorship by managing laterally, up, and out
One of the biggest mistakes early-stage managers make is they believe their primary or only real responsibility is facing “downwards” to their direct reports.
As a result, they neglect cultivating healthy peer, skip-level, and cross-departmental relationships, where valuable perspectives are gained, and where mentoring and sponsorship occur.
If you want to gain trust in your initiatives, seek input and support by actively managing upwards and outwards from where your team sits.
You’ll learn to speak the business language that translates the technicalities of network automation into a value story that sells your vision and that others can champion.
How do you put this into practice? Book a quarterly sync with peers in operations, finance, and product to share automation progress and get their input and perspective.
. . . . .
Run the numbers people care about
When you’re managing a network, you care about technical numbers. However, the business cares about numbers that reflect either a return on investment (ROI) or a net present value (NPV). These are two different framings for how an investment pays off.
- ROI is a percentage of how much you gain versus what you spent to gain it. For example, if you invest $100 in network automation and you get $120 back, then your ROI is 20%.
- NPV is a fixed amount of money (e.g., a dollar amount). It tells you the total value of future cash flows from an investment, adjusted for the time value of money (because money you get today is worth more than money you get in the future).
For example, if that $100 investment generates $150 over three years but you discount future money, it might only be worth $130. You subtract the invested amount from the generated revenue or savings, to arrive at an NPV of $30.
ROI resonates with executives who want a clear percentage return, while NPV is what finance leaders like CFOs will compare against other capital projects. Always prepare both so you’re ready for either conversation.
Note that because automation initiatives tend to have heavy upfront investments (software, people, etc.) but pay off handsomely over time, the ROI picture is usually high, but the NPV is lower.
Note also that the automation initiative’s NPV will be compared with other capital projects, like a new data center or cybersecurity investments. That’s why it tends to be extremely helpful whenever possible to align automation investments with other major capital projects.
. . . . .
Connect the metrics dots
When building your ROI or NPV business case, you can’t just make up gains as an imaginative exercise. You need to calculate them based on how automation will impact key metrics that your business cares about.
Service delivery metrics
If your business is in the service delivery category, you can forecast gains from your investment in the form of increased revenues based on moving the needle in the arena of customer satisfaction. The greater the customer satisfaction, the better your customer retention–which is worth real money.
Typical metrics for customer satisfaction are collected by CSAT, NPS, and other surveys. In this case, you can project an improvement in CSAT/NPS that yields increased revenues or saved marketing and sales expenses to achieve the same level of revenues.
Work with stakeholders who would be motivated to see the network deliver this improvement to help you articulate this in the right way for your business.
Operational efficiency metrics
When it comes to operational efficiency, find out how your business measures it.
In some cases, it’s a simple loading issue for personnel: How much staff is needed to handle growth, for example.
Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) is a key metric for how fast it takes to recover from errors that cause productivity-impacting downtime. If your business can calculate the average cost of a network outage, then reducing incidents per year gives you an easy cost savings number to work with.
Compliance metrics
For compliance, you want to perform a calculation of the future value of avoiding non-compliance risks. You can do this by performing a compliance risk quantification:
- Let’s say you estimate a potential of $2M in fines and legal costs due to non-compliance. You multiply that number by the probability of that happening in the next five years, for example a 20% chance, which means your expected loss is $500K over five years.
- Then, you discount that potential risk based on time, say by 10%, using a future value of risk reduction:
- Formula: (Cost x Probability) / (1 + discount rate)years
- In this case, it would be ($1M*20%) / ((1.1)^5) = $248K, which is the present value of avoiding that risk.
- If automation costs $100K, the NPV of avoiding that risk is $148K
These are all calculations you’ll want input from your business peers to get right (see mentors and sponsors above).
Finally, if you use projected improvements in internal business metrics to support your ROI and NPV business case, you’ll need to be able to measure and report on the results so you can show how the bet paid off over time.
. . . . .
Wrapping it all up
Ultimately, armed with the ROI/NPV, supported by metrics that your organization uses and that are backed up by peers in your business, and using the terms that will connect with the stakeholders who need to approve, you can tell a compelling value story of how your automation investment will pay off.
The track record of your connection with others in the business, the clarity of your thinking, the history of your team’s internal investments, and gained expertise will maximize the reasons for your leadership to trust in you and take the calculated risk to invest in your initiative.
In summary, trust is the bridge between your automation vision and business investment. Build it early, tell the right value story, and back it with numbers that matter.
