We're always looking for the least effort, manual or otherwise, the easiest one to get to, the low hanging fruits, it is human nature after all. That's not necessarily a bad thing though as long as the purpose is achieved without too much of a compromise. I say compromise because inevitably you have to give in order to get something, Such is the Yin and Yang of the Universe.
The same is true of organisations as they look to cut costs and realize resource efficiencies and automating systems administration is definitely one to consider. So it begs the question as to what makes sense to automate in MicroStrategy administration. User management, History list cleanup, I server shutdown and startup are just a few of the activities that companies have automated and benefited from in terms of reliability and cost savings. The HL cleanup and I Server are pretty much self contained within MicroStrategy and easy enough to setup. However, User mananagment is a trifle more complex as it integrates with other identity management systems and arguably provides better savings, especially if the user population is large. If the IT infrastructure supports it, pretty much all of the user management functions can be automated including User creation, deletion and synchronization. This is typically a custom solution as LDAP integration only takes you so far. Of course MicroStrategy keeps improving it's offering on a regular basis …so who knows..maybe this will all be available OOB sometime soon.
Ishtiaq, welcome to the family and the blogosphere. Look forward to starting some new conversations around our COE in MicroStrategy