Elly Yates-Roberts |
All too often, we at Kelverion hear that businesses are trying to deliver more services with fewer resources, all whilst meeting tight service level agreements. There are many automation use cases to relieve this pressure and this article explores the top five that are driving automation adoption within service management.
1. Joiners, movers and leavers
Joiners, movers and leavers is one of the most painful tasks for overloaded service desks to process. The creation of accounts for new employees or temporary workers, adjusting access for users moving roles and terminating IT accounts for those departing your business, are labour intensive activities which require senior staff who have the necessary systems access and expertise to perform.
2. Office 365 management
Office 365 saves companies the time and energy of managing separate Exchange and SharePoint infrastructures. However, the management of users and permissions can still be time-consuming – creating and adding users to groups, assigning licenses, disabling users – the automation of these tasks releases pressure on the service management team.
Some organisations believe that these tasks must be completed manually because of security concerns with administration rights, but this needn’t be the case. The key is to provide a self-service interface – which is controlled via an existing change management approval process – where anyone can submit requests. As such, the automation platform executes the Office 365 management requests in minutes.
3. Standard IT tasks
There are many day-to-day standard tasks which are completed manually by IT staff. Even in the unlikely scenario that this extra workload isn’t an issue, these tasks impact the morale of the service desk team, whose time could be better spent elsewhere.
Password resets, restarting a virtual machine, deleting an Active Directory account, traceroute checks – these standard daily tasks can all be automated.
4. Virtual machine provisioning
Using virtual machines (VMs) to run different operating systems, test applications and back up data has been game changing for IT agility, but manually creating and managing these VMs takes time. Automating the provisioning of VMs can save your organisation time and money.
VMs are built and managed securely through self-service requests, which ensures that the IT team remains in control of these assets.
5. Self-service software delivery
Our final and most requested automation use case is the automatic installation of software. When the end user requires a new application, they are typically left to wait for a senior member of an IT resolver group to add them to a software deployment tool group to action. This can and should be automated.
One of the most exciting advancements in automation is the implementation of the self-service portal. All the above use cases can be completed by the end user submitting requests through any self-service portal. Not only does this reduce call volumes, it also delivers a modern experience for the end user – something which is becoming expected in the workplace and will exceed the expectations of your internal stakeholders.
Greg Charman is the vice president of solutions and services at Kelverion
Visit the Kelverion website to find out more about its service management automation solutions.