Businesses and organizations can leverage automation technologies such as Artificial intelligence, NLP, and RPA to streamline their operational services. Among all the sectors IT industries are often responsible for routine checks of system and data handling manually.
This case scenario has pressed the need for IT process automation as CIOs and other technology leadership positions are looking to transform their service operations. According to Gartner, “ By 2023, enhancements in analytics and automation remediation capabilities will refocus around 30% of IT operation efforts from support to continuous engineering”
IT process automation (ITPA) solutions aim to automate and improve the IT shared services and operations such as service desk automation, application monitoring, and infrastructure management. By including IT process automation in the business, technologists can monitor applications and workflows at ease. With no code or low code solutions, developers can rapidly create automated workflows and maintain focus on market planning and business strategy.
Characteristics Of top ITPA use cases
Before incorporating IT process automation tools in your organization, it is a must-have to look at the criteria for the process to be automated. However, IT process automation can reduce the service delivery time and enhance the productivity of IT resources, but it is crucial to keep the criteria in check before implementing it in your operations. Here are some criteria or characteristics of IT tasks that are suitable for IT process automation-
- Prone to error or reworks
- High volume & value of transactions
- Frequent access to multiple systems
- Limited Human Intervention
- A clear understanding of current manual costs
However, these criteria are crucial for IT process automation but nowhere it means that the automation use case must fulfill all these characteristics. Many business processes have a low value of transactions but if they are performed in high volume, then they are the right fit for automation.
Use Cases of IT Process Automation
User Management
IT staff need to create a user account, grant access and permissions while onboarding new employees. Also, they need to update and add user details in the database such as Microsoft, Oracle, and others. The task of creating a new user account and updating user details manually is time-consuming and cumbersome for IT staff, especially when data volume is high. To streamline the account creation process automation comes in handy. The automation bots can automatically get account creation requests, create usernames, generate passwords, and send email notifications to users. By automating the account creation process hiccups related to delay resolutions, manual execution can be avoided.
Password Reset
As per Gartner, 20-30% of IT tickets are password reset requests and it cost $300K annually. Password resets are the simplest to do, but their sheer volume takes a toll on IT staff productivity. This process is like a swarm of ants, not harmful but persistent and annoying. During non-business hours, IT staff might not be able to access data across the system and provide resolution. But by providing end-to-end automation, a password reset process can be streamlined without manual intervention. An AI-powered chatbot will autonomously access user information from an excel file, verify the username in the active directory, and reset the password without manual intervention. Also, automation frees up the IT staff for more complex tasks and reduces TAT from 2 minutes to 3 seconds.
Service Desk Automation
Service desk professionals handle labor-intensive tasks like email routing, end-user support, security operations, IT tickets, and others. Also, they have to complete the necessary documentation for ticket classification and assignment. And a large number of IT tickets assignment leads to delayed resolution and unresponsiveness. This antiquated operation model can be transformed with intelligent automation in place. With AI technologies like machine learning, IT organizations can provide self-service to users with a quick resolution for email, IVR, and chat-based tickets. Also, AI collects diverse information from users, creates a knowledge base for auto ticket assignment and resolution. With AI IT organizations can reduce the TAT by 90% and operational costs by 25%.
[Also Read: How AI with IT Automation can transform towards Digital Innovation]
Data Access Management
Access management aims to grant authorized users the right to use a service. When new employees join the organization, they request access to share drive/folder, database, remote VPN, and software like HRMS, Salesforce, etc. And manual processing of access management leads to a lack of security, unpremeditated disclosure of data, and lack of evidence for access activities. However, AI-powered IT automation reduces the probability of human error as it ensures that authorization is accurate. Automation makes it easier to save and record user activity, revoke specific user access, efficient security audits, and avoid security breaches with a predefined set of rules.
System Health Check
A system health check provides a snapshot of the overall performance of a system at a moment in time. Monitoring the system data, determining the status of devices, the agent’s application, and with a predefined set of rules sending an alert for remediation before any critical issue springs up are some tiresome tasks to handle manually. By going beyond RPA, and using hyper-automation enables the documentation of all steps in the workflow for future investigation or statistical reporting. This process reduces the time from minutes to seconds and allows IT engineers to make data-driven decisions in real-time.
Email Notifications
Manually sending hundreds of email notifications on incident resolution, system alerts, data access, ticket status, and others disrupt the service desk agent productivity. Also, manually crafting notifications is a repetitive and time-intensive process. But the good part about email notification is that it can be carried out by using predetermined rules applied to structured data. This end-to-end automation decreases processing time, improves service desk agent productivity, and allows employees to work on more complex tasks.
Server Disk Space Management
In an IT organization, monitoring, and maintaining servers with disk clean-up, increasing disk space can be time-consuming and repetitive activity. And this activity is crucial because running out of disk space due to a temporary file might crash your system. Using automation tools can alert on low disk space, and take corrective action for required disk space capacity without any glitches. By automating this process service desk staff can quickly diagnose and resolve the issues proactively and reduce TAT with enhanced customer experience.
Data Management
In an IT workplace, a large portion of business processes involves data and information. As per a report, three key challenges that impact the ability to deliver excellent customer service include poor data quality, method of data transfer, and lack of new technology. And manually data collection, integration to the mainframe system, and analysis is an iterative process. But applying AI technologies like machine learning, OCR makes tasks like data entry, capture, creation, and update both faster and efficient. This AI-powered automation, reduces operations cost and overheads by eliminating manual error. With the capability to connect with any external source for data processing, automation simplifies the workflow and increases your ROI.
[Also Read: IT Support During COVID-19: How to Stay Sane in a Crazy World!]
Conclusion
Today organizations more than ever before are leveraging AI and ITPA technology to streamline their business process. And there is no harm in near-zero error rates and reduced operational costs. And IT process automation not only increases service satisfaction & productivity but also gives service desk agents enhanced digital capabilities to provide a better resolution. Hence, it’s time for IT organizations to change the way their business operates and prepare for the digital transformation the industry demands.