While we still don’t have our entire world run by bots as promised to us in science fiction books and movies, the era of automation is here. Currently, the world of technology is so agile that if you miss out on a particular trend today, you may run the risk of becoming obsolete tomorrow.
With rapid new developments in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), IT automation trends and management strategies across industries are also experiencing a paradigm shift. As these IT automation tools continue to transform enterprise business processes, it’s important to understand why IT automation is the key that your business can’t afford to miss.
ITSM – IT automation tools & technologies
In a digital-first business landscape, your business must explore strong IT Service Management (ITSM) options. ITSM empowers your teams to take a more structured approach to service management, increases transparency and accountability to drive better customer satisfaction.
As more and more companies are adopting multi-cloud and hybrid IT strategies, it is driving the adoption of IT automation tools and technologies across the ITSM landscape. Gartner predicted a while back that by 2021, over 75% of the organizations will have adopted these capabilities and 75% of all databases will operate in cloud infrastructure by the year 2023.
Why invest in ITSM automation?
By automating your ITSM processes, you can take mundane data-related tasks off your employees’ to-do lists and improve service requests and onboarding workflows. Apart from the improved processes, automation also helps with change and incidence management, which requires a commitment to integration, training, and flexible implementation.
With the rise of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a whole new world of process optimization options has opened up for the IT landscape. With AI-driven hyper-automation capabilities, businesses can compose autonomous operations within a complex hybrid IT environment. They are readily adopting AI/ML capabilities for end-to-end automation workflows to replace and eliminate manual processes of resource provisioning and configurations, data management, and service management.
Enhancing the ITSM system with ServiceNow
If your goal is not just to improve IT support and service delivery but also streamlining all your business processes to achieve digital transformation, ServiceNow is the option you’d want to explore. ServiceNow, a global leader in enterprise cloud platforms, can help you move from incoherent, outdated legacy systems, applications, and other manual documentation hassles through intelligent automation.
ServiceNow makes requests handling easy with options to create self-service portals. Its functionality extends not only to HR processes but also to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) procedures. It gives you comprehensive visibility across your organizational processes from a single point of view.
From establishing clear dependency mapping, identifying service issues to automating incident response and change management, and measuring the impact, ServiceNow offers a complete package that helps you meet new expectations for incident and change management. It also delivers both the stability that processes need as well as the speed that new business drivers require.
Optimizing IT workflows with ServiceNow Automation process
One of the major requirements of the digital world is to bridge the gap between traditional IT practices and modern business needs. ServiceNow offers industry-specific workflows to help customers in different industries accelerate their digital transformation by enabling workflows that can be accessed from anywhere, anytime.
It also allows you to build repeatable processes so you can extend these workflows to automate other similar processes. There are plenty of instances of using automation to cut out mundane manual IT processes and optimizing IT workflows that can be a lifesaver for businesses. The productivity improvement that automation brings to the table, along with the amount of cost savings companies can enjoy once redundancies are removed from the equation, is immense and some of those extra resources can be used to strengthen other key profiles of the team.
Transforming your IT service desk with automation
To keep up with the evolving demands of the market and customers, it is important to have your service requests handled at machine speeds, not human. Your end-users like to explore different channels of IT support and everyone needs instant resolutions. The average cost of using a level 1 service desk engineer to manually handle a change, incident, or request is $22 and according to Gartner, the end-user to IT service desk worker ratio is 70:1. With the automation of your IT service desk and creating an omnichannel experience, you can offer 24/7 support without draining your budget.
This not only helps enhance customer experiences but also improves your employee experiences. According to a Gartner press release, virtual customer assistants (VCA) and other automation channels have considerably reduced the average employee workload while simultaneously enhancing the consumer experience.
Starting your ITSM automation journey
Gartner has predicted through 2024, enhancements in analytics and automatic remediation capabilities will refocus 30% of IT operations efforts, from support to continuous engineering, and that by 2024, organizations will lower operational costs by 30% by combining hyper-automation technologies with redesigned operational processes.
The point here is that there are probably many opportunities to automate processes of your service desk that you may not be aware of and it may not have a significant effect on your organization now. But automation is here to stay and the key to staying ahead of the curve is to start by automating smaller tasks that are requested frequently by your customers.
Digital transformation is difficult but technology is inevitable. Empowered with tools like automation can help you bring out your A-game and evolve into an autonomous digital enterprise that’s smart, evolving, and can withstand seismic changes.
Find out more about ServiceNow ITSM automation from the experienced team of NOUS Infosystems. We can help you solve common enterprise challenges with automation and more.
