Valentine’s Day is traditionally known as a time to express feelings of love, appreciation, or affection. How you celebrate is up to you. Maybe you send out cards, buy flowers, go to a restaurant, or find other ways to share your thoughts on that special day. But you don’t have to just thank or recognize people (or even your dogs or cats, for that matter). Why not also take a moment and think about the technology that makes your job easier? Really. I’m referring to technology that creates a good experience for your end users (the workforce) while keeping IT personnel happy and saving your organization time and money. So, get ready to bring out the new holiday chocolates (or those left over from holidays in December) and enjoy them while reading these words of recognition for service desk automation.
- Embrace the savings in time and costs
Let’s face it. To keep up with the demands of digital business, requests have to be handled at machine – and not human – speed. Your end users can reach IT support through many channels and they expect an immediate response to their requests. This type of response is only possible when tools are used to automate service desk tasks. Keep in mind that the average cost of using a level 1 service desk engineer to manually handle a change, incident, or request is $22. So, by leveraging IT process and orchestration tools you can reduce those costs considerably. - Appreciate the freedom of modeling and automating any IT process
As your organization offers more services, interactions with the workforce will also increase. Your service desk or IT operations staff can save time by avoiding the need to manually handle service desk tickets. They can offer more self-help options and build workflows that perform the same interactions with relevant IT toolsets. - Make someone happy
With service desk automation, the service desk team can be more productive while users are also satisfied with the speed and accuracy of service resolution. A recent Forrester Report: Five Key Initiatives to Wow Your Workforce with Your Service Desk describes the need to “wow” your workforce by pursuing opportunities for automation and doing more with less. The report emphasized how efficient ticket resolution and self-service options are critical to workforce satisfaction and productivity. - Experience automated guest Wi-Fi provisioning
Automating guest Wi-Fi provisioning is a great example of the power of service desk automation. Here’s what this typical process looks like WITHOUT automation:- Because Wi-Fi networks are almost always secured, visitors to your office may need to request access and be issued temporary credentials to log in. The process might involve many steps and people. For example, the host contacts the service desk 24 hours before the visitor arrives, the service desk requests detailed information about the host and then creates a service request for the security team. Then the security team is notified, checks the guest’s credentials, sets up an ID and password, routes it back to the service desk team, and so on.
Now, see how simple it is with automation:
- Requests are handled at machine speed. Manual steps are encapsulated within an IT process automation tool so that the process can be automatically triggered and executed when new requests come in.
The ease of automating guest Wi-Fi requests is just one example of many service desk processes that lend themselves to full automation. Others include restarting services, unlocking accounts and devices, extending storage capacity, resetting passwords, requesting access, and much more.
- Reach the cloud
Once you automate your service desk you can use the same tool to automate provisioning in your data centers and the cloud. So, if someone needs an instance spun up on Amazon Web Services or Rackspace, this person can request it through a portal and use an orchestration solution to automate the entire set-up process. - Heartfelt thoughts about love and money
There are probably many opportunities to automate capabilities of your existing service desk that you may not be aware of. The key is to start by automating smaller tasks that are requested frequently.
Want to learn more reasons to love service desk automation, including what types of requests to automate and how to determine the savings in productivity? Check out this white paper, “How to Streamline Your Service Desk with Automation.”
