Your IT Service Desk Needs to Automate More, Here’s Why

IT service management (ITSM) industry research shows that many organizations want to automate more, whether in the IT department or other lines of business. For example, in an earlier blog, I shared a list of the top IT service desk goals for 2021 according to the 1000+ IT professionals who took the SysAid 2021 State of Service Management survey. Here, “Improve my team’s productivity through the use of automation” was the top goal for 2021.

It’s understandable because automation allows business operations and outcomes to be all three of “better, faster, cheaper.” Unlike with manual operations, where there’s usually a necessary trade-off across quality, speed, and cost. Consequently, the addition of automation fits many of the key needs of organizations that are looking for improved quality, from a variety of perspectives, as well as increased efficiency.

If you’re not yet convinced that automation is something that will help your organization’s operations and outcomes – across all three of “better, faster, cheaper” – then please keep reading to see if I can change your mind.

The many benefits of automation

If your organization doesn’t already have a focus on automation for the year ahead, and beyond, then – unless you’ve already doubled down on automation in previous years – let’s see if this quick list of automation benefits resonates with you and your organization’s needs.

The key benefits of automation include:

• Staff optimization – automation frees up people from repetitive and tedious tasks to work on more complex and rewarding things.
• Scaling – operations can be scaled and optimized through automation without the financial burden of increased employee numbers.
• Increased velocity – automation “works” faster than people. Plus, it’s available 24×7.
• Cost reduction – automation is a lower cost option relative to the human labor it replaces or augments.
• Better experiences – for both internal end users and external customers, with the increased velocity a key factor in this.
• Meeting end-user expectations of self-service – with the immediacy of provision or remediation elevating the effectiveness of self-service
• Improved governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) – with audit trails of what happened and when, plus the outcome, available to support regulatory and compliance needs.
• Reduced human errors and the minimization of their business impact – because automation consistently does what’s needed of it (in line with its instructions).

If you’re warming to the opportunity of automation, then you might be thinking about how best to approach it. If so, then the following five automation success tips will help.

5 automation success tips

1. Take a business value, rather than a technology-led, approach to automation. It’s important to automate based on the creation of business value and not on the available technology. Look at the value chain and how the addition of automation will deliver additional business value. This could relate to many things, depending on your organization’s strategic objectives. For example, improving customer experience, reducing costs, driving growth, or tightening up relative to security and GRC needs.
2. Get your service management basics right before automating. After all, automating a bad process, say, is simply speeding up the process to deliver its poor outcome more quickly. This also applies to self-service portals too. Where all the back-end automation in the world will likely not make up for a bad front end that your end users don’t want to use.
3. Don’t assess automation tool capabilities in isolation. Instead, there’s a need to consider automation technologies in the context of your existing IT ecosystem. For example, a new workflow automation solution needs to integrate with the existing automation/orchestration tools for activities such as software deployments and patching or the provision of cloud services. Ideally, in both instances, cradle-to-grave automation can be used to deliver what’s needed without any human involvement thanks to role-based, pre-approval policies.
4. Look to innovate while automating. The automation of manual processes or tasks is often seen as a like-for-like replacement of the existing human activities and steps. But this doesn’t necessarily exploit the key benefit of automation across “better, faster, cheaper.” So, use the opportunity of automation to identify improvements to the status quo that better serve business needs in terms of improved operations and outcomes.
5. Remember that the addition of automation isn’t only a technology-based change. Instead, as with the introduction of any new or changed technology, it’s also likely to impact existing ways of working such that it’s a people-affecting change too. As such, this necessitates the need for organizational change management to help bring people along with the new ways of working and to minimize the resistance to change that will otherwise be a significant barrier to automation success. You can read more on organizational change management in my “What’s Organizational Change Management and Why Should ITSM Pros Be Bothered?” blog.

If you can follow this guidance, then – if you pardon my management cliché – automation is very much a win-win-win for “better, faster, cheaper” operations and outcomes.