The need for autonomic, self-managing systems is increasingly becoming more critical because of the rapid growth in complexity in IT infrastructures and the rising costs of managing this complexity.   

There are three main forces driving this complexity:

1. Information technologies are evolving exponentially to be more powerful and, at the same time, less expensive, resulting in the implementations of ever larger IT infrastructures. This is driving computing to become ubiquitous and increasingly embedded in our everyday personal and work lives.
2. IT infrastructures are connected through the Internet, forming a very wide-scale distributed system, providing access to essentially any information, from any location.
3. As IT is increasingly integrated into all aspects of business, society and our personal lives, a critical expectation is that it is reliable, always available, and easy to use. The dependency on IT is as strong as dependencies on other essential infrastructures, such as electricity and transportation.

Autonomic computing addresses this complexity by using technology to manage technology. The term autonomic is derived from human biology. The autonomic nervous system monitors your heartbeat, checks your blood sugar level and keeps your body temperature close to 98.6°F without any conscious effort on your part. In much the same way, self-managing autonomic capabilities anticipate IT system requirements and resolve problems with minimal human intervention. As a result, IT professionals can focus on tasks with higher value to the business.

However, there is an important distinction between autonomic activity in the human body and autonomic activities in IT systems. Many of the decisions made by autonomic capabilities in the body are involuntary. In contrast, self-managing autonomic capabilities in computer systems perform tasks that IT professionals choose to delegate to the technology according to policies. Adaptable policy—rather than hard-coded procedure—determines the types of decisions and actions that autonomic capabilities perform.

IT businesses organize the tasks of managing an overall IT infrastructure and its associated organization as a collection of best practices and processes such as those defined in ITSM best practices and PRM-IT.

The efficiency and effectiveness of typical IT processes are measured using metrics such as elapsed time to complete a process, percentage executed correctly and the cost to execute a process. Self-managing systems can positively affect these metrics, improving responsiveness and quality of service, reducing Total Cost of Ownership and enhancing time to value through:

• Rapid process initiation – typically, implementing these processes requires an IT professional to initiate the process, create a change request, collect incident details and open a problem record. In a self-managing system, components can initiate these processes based on information derived directly from the system. This helps reduce the manual labor and time required to respond to critical situations, resulting in two immediate benefits: more timely initiation of the process and more accurate data from the system.
• Reduced time and skill requirements – these processes include tasks or activities that are skill-intensive, long lasting and difficult to complete correctly because of system complexity. In a change management process, one such activity is the assess change impact task. In a problem management process, one such activity is the diagnose problem task. In self-managing systems, resources are created such that the expertise required to perform these tasks can be encoded within the system and the task can be automated. This helps to reduce the amount of time and the degree of skill required to perform these tedious tasks. Hence, IT professionals are freed to perform higher value tasks, such as establishing business policies that the IT system needs to fulfill.

These intuitive and collaborative characteristics of the self-management capabilities enable businesses (large enterprises as well as small and medium-size companies) to operate their business processes and IT infrastructure more efficiently with less human intervention, decreasing costs and enhancing the organization's ability to react to change. For instance, a self-managing system could simply deploy a new resource and then tune the environment to optimize the services delivered by the new resource. This is a notable shift from traditional processes that require a significant amount of analysis before and after deployment to ensure that the resource operates effectively and efficiently.