Can I get an IP? Do what?

How many times have you asked or been asked for an IP address for your network and heard the famous words of “just ping until you find an available address” or “we have an IPAM solution but not everyone enters information correctly”? Oh, the joys of IP address management. It comes with such joy sometimes, doesn’t it? In this time of where we are today; it is amazing to me that organizations still function in this manner especially when everyone seems to think they want dynamic and elastic environments, correct? Why is it that just to get an IP address is such a tedious effort involving too many hoops to go through? Is it because your organization doesn’t currently have a good policy on these sorts of tasks? Or is it because there are too many manual processes in place to accomplish this simple task? So why then, would you not want to implement a streamlined, automated process to handle this workflow of assigning IP addresses by removing all of the middleman processes involved as well? Are you serious? Is what you are thinking right? If we were to do that it would mean that we would be slowly removing tasks and procedures that we are responsible for. Oh, the famous “worried about being replaced by automation” response. So how do you handle IP address management in your environments?