As fast as the world and technology evolve, IT departments are evolving with it. To stay ahead of all this change, IT leaders need to free up time for the most important tasks. Automation is an obvious answer to do this.
If you can automate the high-volume, low-complexity tasks that drain resources, you can boost productivity (and make your team’s life a lot easier).
But knowing where to start with automation can be a major challenge. Organizations can only reap the full benefits of IT automation if they're investing in automating the right tasks and processes.
We recommend a four-step, data-driven approach to solving for this challenge.
1. Access real data and history: You can’t understand your records, services or processes if you don’t have accurate data at your fingertips. A single, unified IT platform solution can gather and connect the data – enabling greater visibility and more efficient analysis of how you have been operating so you can design optimum workflows and automations for your modern IT operation.
2. Identify your most requested services: You can use predictive intelligence, like a clustering tool, to group together your most requested services. The clustering tool will also analyze those groupings and recommend some top candidates for automation. You won’t save much, if any, time by automating a rote action made once per month. But automating a rote action that occurs multiple times a day can free up an administrator’s time to focus on higher value work.
3. Review and prioritize: Now that you’ve let the data tell you the top candidates, it’s time to review and prioritize. Take a step back to align the potential candidates you discovered through predictive intelligence with your business objectives. You may prioritize different tasks if your IT department is being asked to reduce the overall cost of providing services versus if your goal is to improve the speed of issue resolution and user experiences.
4. Quantify potential benefits: The final step is making that business case internally for the resources needed for IT modernization. The good news is that the right platform has a built-in calculation engine to help you through this logic – whether it’s financial or productivity or another factor.
With the right platform, you can accelerate IT modernization to drive much more value within your organization. But you need an analytic lens and intelligence to find which tasks will drive the greatest value from automation and achieve an IT organization focused on agility, innovation and optimization.
Learn more about delivering IT modernization transformation securely at speed and scale in this ebook.
About the Author
Toby Alcock is DXC ITSM Transformation Manager in the ServiceNow Practice for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.