Low-hanging fruit in IT automation: where to start

If you do not know where to start with automation, look for the task that everyone on the team knows is pointless but keeps doing every week.

Most IT departments have more of these than you would expect.

Common examples that appear almost everywhere

User account management is done by hand from a form, even though the HR system has an API or at least a CSV export. Each new user takes 15-30 minutes of someone's time, several times a week. The same applies to account removal and group membership management.

Disk space monitoring is something someone checks on the servers every now and then. The alert arrives when it is already too late. This is trivial to script.

Backup reports get read but nobody tests whether the backup is actually usable. Restore testing does not happen.

IT support writes the same answer to "password expired" or "VPN not working" tickets dozens of times a week.

What these actually need

None of these require n8n or Power Automate. Most of the time, a few lines of PowerShell scheduled with Task Scheduler or a cron job is enough.

A user account report sent to the IT manager every Monday morning:

$inactiveUsers = Search-ADAccount -AccountInactive -TimeSpan 90 -UsersOnly |
    Where-Object {$_.Enabled -eq $true}

$inactiveUsers | Select-Object Name, SamAccountName, LastLogonDate |
    Export-Csv -Path "C:\Reports\InactiveUsers_$(Get-Date -Format 'yyyyMMdd').csv" -NoTypeInformation

Send-MailMessage -To "itmanager@company.com" `
    -Subject "Weekly report: inactive users" `
    -Attachments "C:\Reports\InactiveUsers_$(Get-Date -Format 'yyyyMMdd').csv" `
    -SmtpServer "smtp.company.com"

Get-EventLog, Get-PSDrive, Send-MailMessage. That covers most of what is needed for basic IT automations.

How to identify a good candidate

A good automation target is done the same way every time and requires no judgement. It is error-prone, meaning humans make mistakes doing it but automation does not. It repeats weekly or more often. And not doing it would be noticed, meaning it actually matters.

The point is not the technology

The point is that automation does not need to be a major project to be useful.

The smallest useful automation is the one that removes someone's frustration once a week and frees that time for something that actually requires thinking. It can often be built in a few hours.

Larger automations come later, once you have a better sense of which processes are worth automating and which are not.

Want to map out the automation potential of your IT department? Get in touch.