Organizations are seeking ways to reduce cost in IT
operations on every possible way. One of the areas that seem promising is automation.
In the past the only way to automate certain tasks were writing scripts to do
certain tasks. However using scripts has its own problems:

• 
  Writing a script is not a onetime event. A
  scripting solution is brittle and breaks easily when environment where scripts
  are running changes. Writing scripts that handles most of the possible exceptions
  is not an easy task and requires a lot of experience.
• 
  Scripting is a development skill. You need to
  keep people in your team to write and maintain scripts. Different products used
  to have different scripting languages but thanks to Powershell, it is getting
  standardized over most of Microsoft products.

Microsoft has recently released System Center 2012 Orchestrator
which is used to create workflows (called runbooks) in an easy way. Basically
it helps IT pro’s visually create linked commands to do automated tasks. It can
communicate with other systems through Integration packs and can be very
powerful tool to fulfill your automation needs. If you need more information on
orchestrator, you can start here.

The problem with automating tasks is not about the tool that
you are using. It is related to the processes. When you are doing a task
manually, it is easier for somebody else to follow on what you are doing and
when. If something goes wrong, you can search for event logs on who logged on
to systems and ask questions on their actions. However if it is automated
(either through scripting or orchestrator) tracking what went wrong becomes
much more difficult. In order to ease have a smooth operation, you need to have
a more structured approach. For example you need to have a change a request for
the automated task (such as cleaning up old computer accounts from Active
Directory) recorded together with the results so that you can search for it later.
Keeping these kind of records were a manual task in the past. However
orchestrator has a Service manager Integration pack that you can do these kinds
of requests automatically.

The best way to implement automation in IT systems is to
have Service manager 2012 to keep records of what operations are being done and
even providing capabilities such as approvals to keep it under control. For
example you can have a scheduled task in orchestrator that searches for old
computer accounts in Active Directory weekly. If it finds such accounts it will
create a change request in Service manager which goes through standard approval
processes to IT administrator and after this approval a runbook in Orchestrator
is triggered to actually delete the accounts and results recorded in the change
request. You would be able to see reports on change requests on when deletion
of certain computer accounts were requested, who approved it and when it was finished.

Using System Center 2012 Service manager together with
orchestrator will save you lot of time without losing control of your IT
environment.