Enhancing IT Support Efficiency Through Automation

Business leaders love the idea of automation for increased efficiency and cost reduction in IT support processes. It’s the IT team that must make it work. But leveraging RPA and AI for business/IT process efficiency can’t occur in an IT vacuum. IT processes impact real people and workflows across the business, so it all starts with understanding what the automation process means to them.

Your workforce may hate the current manual methods for getting the services and access they need to complete any process. It doesn’t mean they’re ready for automation. Funding and shifting business priorities also make it challenging for IT leaders to achieve swift, measurable results. The need for business agility can’t wait for clarity in this constantly changing environment.

This is why IT support improvements offer the biggest efficiency/cost savings return in the near and long-term. The challenge lies in automating these processes in a complicated jumble of dependencies between:

• Workflows
• Systems
• People/departments
• Service providers
• Data locations and access
• Automation solution vendor provider choices

IT leaders must deal with these aspects of successful IT process automation in a pressure cooker of high ROI expectations. Making this happen starts with understanding the biggest IT process automation efficiency payoffs and how they can affect the entire business.

IT Help Desk Management

Most stakeholders are unaware that IT help desk automation combines workflow and self-service portal automation processes. They both require highly defined business rules to deliver their benefits. RPA bots can be trained to read, route, and respond to an IT service desk request. It takes intelligent automation that adds artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to enable continuous learning.

Automatic routing and categorization of support tickets must go beyond responding to routine request to: 

• Analyze, understanding and respond to complex request and process completion in real time
• Determine both the order and importance of a request (which aren’t always mutually exclusive)
• Route the request to the proper queue and, in some cases, the exact person
• Ensure that others are aware of the request and its timeline for resolution while keeping the requester and the IT team in the loop via emails

This process can be a combination of self service or technician response via purpose built chatbots and AI/ML analytics applications.  

Organizations can look at vendor solutions they can implement, or work with a vendor to design a bespoke RPA solution to fit their needs. The challenge for IT teams and stakeholders is how best to make that choice for their business.  

The ideal scenario is to have a support partner that has worked with varied vendors in the RPA, AI, and broader automation space. They also need to have a skilled team onboard that has created solutions for a wide variety of client need scenarios. This enables them to help guide the IT team in assessing their needs in the short term and the long term. It’s all about determining the best approach that will plot the most efficient course for the business automation journey while delivering the best ROI.  

An automation support partner’s ability to take a more vendor-agnostic approach helps to keep budget needs and timelines top of mind. It simultaneously avoids making deep compromises that negatively affect outcomes and ROI in terms of cost savings, efficiency, and scalability.

 IT & Asset Management

Asset management is a vital IT service that connects to help desk needs and HR for employee onboarding or offboarding. Automating this process looks like the help desk approach where you turn notifications into automated forms. This becomes part of comprehensive IT asset management convergence of hardware and software:  

• Inventories
• Lifecycles
• Costs and licensing
• Contracts
• Cloud costs

They collectively feed into IT support efficiency of Capex and Opex control of assets across their lifecycle.  

Automation via RPA and AI/ML can reduce provisioning costs and time across networks, servers, databases, applications, and users. This spans everything from configuration to connectivity and security via identity access management (IAM), zero trust frameworks, and compliance workflows where RPA bots and broader IT process automation can:   

• Provision/disable business emails, accounts, and access permissions/passwords
• Provide business data or file access to individual users based on zero trust frameworks
• Deactivate offboarded business accounts or restrict user access to business data
• Detect and alert IT to system vulnerabilities and unauthorized access
• Deny database, network, or server access after breach attempt detection
• Automate system backups and latest patch installation with action alerts and sandboxing
• Automat compliances and auditing form completion and process monitoring

These can all be part of centralized process automation control of the IT tech stack. IT can leverage the automation to maximize cost efficient monitoring and management across disparate systems, applications, and data in a hybrid cloud environment.  

Recent events have shown that automating application updates and patch management requires more than just scheduling/execution ability to maximize security. RPA bots can also ensure that sandboxing, testing, and email confirmations requiring IT to start, monitor and stop the process. This helps avoid unknown security risks and outages with updates. 

These IT support automation approaches work together to save time and money by automatically troubleshooting and resolving issues that take up IT personnel time. The idea is to implement them gradually but as part of a larger automation plan. This enables continual time and costs improvements by capturing process insights in real time to maximize improvements and avoid risks.

The RPA, AI/ML, Hyperautomation Journey to Support Efficency

While you can deliver automation in different forms for different outcomes, many businesses are focusing on intelligent process automation that enables the bots to learn. This is one of several aspects to IT process automation (ITPA) and hyperautomation, which uses multiple automation tools to cover every aspect of an IT workflow.  

Back in 2021, Gartner predicted that businesses implementing hyperautomation would see a 30 percent drop in operational costs in 2024. This hints at the reality of hyperautomation as a long-term goal. You must still consider this at the planning stages of an automation journey to guide each step.  

Choosing the right vendors that can take you from the smallest project while moving logically toward achieving a hyperautomation digital business is complex and confusing. It’s difficult for stakeholders focused on short-term ROI and costs to see the forest of hyperautomation because of a focus on the trees of RPA single process automation.  

Many organizations have already made significant decisions about workflow automation by implementing cloud-based solutions like ServiceNow. As a module-based suite, ServiceNow can simultaneously achieve broad or highly specific business automation based on need and scalability.

Solutions of this caliber can also bring complexity and the need for specialized expertise to implement and manage them. It's challenging to find the right expert if you have the budget to hire them in-house or find the fractional or project support if your needs and budget don’t currently support it. 

Having a support partner with that experience enables you to go from assessment to implementation of all automation lifecycle phases. ServiceNow RPA Hub and Process Automation Designer (PAD) are leading examples of this automation approach.

The first is geared to developers automating tasks across ServiceNow and other applications while the second uses no code/low code to enable citizen developers to automate tasks. This combination provides the basis for many of the IT support efficiency automation needs discussed. It also provides a long-term business-wide automation path for an organization. 

Automation can be a complicated process for businesses regardless of whether it’s a single RPA bot or broader and more complex automation tool and workflow integration. That’s why IT teams need a single partner that can help them plot the right course through the forest of automation and enable them to guide both stakeholders and users down the path of change.

The Importance of an Expert Automation Partner

Enhancing IT support efficiency through automation is a process that sits at the center of an organization’s long-term automation journey. It affects all aspects of the business, so it requires: 

• Comprehensive planning to integrate automation into existing infrastructure
• Integration with a change management plan for rollout and training of employees in the new processes

The ability to show the ROI in terms that stakeholders and the workforce can understand requires some complex calculations. The goal is to calculate how the near- and long-term cost and time savings outweigh the implementation costs. Licensing, implementation, and any personnel training are just some costs that must be shown. These must be balanced against the accurate savings metrics derived from actual FTE figures for both the end user and the IT person, with and without automation. 

The right automation partner brings these real-world experiences of automating IT processes to the table through deep experience in:

• Engineering
• ITSM
• Staffing
• Change management
• Automation solution vendors
• App development
• Digital strategy
• Data & analytics
• Business operations

These mix of skills and expertise give your business the ability to:  

• Start with important but repetitive process automations
• Scale to more complex intelligent automations that involve deeper integration with legacy systems and infrastructure across the business

Stakeholders rarely have this long-term view of the automation journey since they focus on a single problem. This can limit their understanding of its workflow, system, and application dependencies. Despite this viewpoint, they will still task IT leaders with doing big things with limited budgets and time.

IT process automation requires the ability to access different systems and move data between them. While the scale may change, SMBs and enterprises face the same challenges of handling transactions across diverse processes in an often-fragmented IT landscape. They both require an automation partner that can help IT support process automation efficiencies make sense to stakeholders. They are the ones who fund and drive them as the workforce and customers will use them. It will always be guided by the IT teas and an automation partner who will implement them and assure they deliver expected results. 

To see why Solugenix is your ideal automation partner, click here 

Read some of a few of our case studies here and here.  

Then contact us for a free proof of concept here.