The Benefits of Automating IT Service Management

The cost and complexity of IT Service Management (ITSM) can be overwhelming for even the most experienced IT leaders. Fortunately, automating ITSM can help streamline processes, improve efficiency and reduce costs. In this blog post, we’ll explore the benefits of automating ITSM and how it can help your organization achieve its goals.

Automating IT Service Management Can Save Time and Money

Automating ITSM is becoming an increasingly popular strategy for companies that are looking to save time and money. With the right automation, your ITSM tool can handle the tasks of sorting, routing and logging support tickets faster and more efficiently than a manual system. This leads to improved performance and lower operational expenses.

Automating IT Service Management can also reduce the need for additional staff; automation reduces or eliminates the burden of tasks such as managing customer requests, approving changes and auditing workflows. This results in cost savings for businesses due to fewer resources being allocated to manual processes.

Finally, automated systems ensure that IT teams respond quickly to customer inquiries and provide timely support, saving customers from frustration and downtime. All in all, automating ITSM allows businesses to experience the benefits of cost savings and improved productivity with fewer resources required.

Mark Hayes, information technology leader at Pima County, AZ, said the county is looking at ways to combat resource drain and employee burnout with their new ITSM tool.

“Prior to TeamDynamix, we didn’t have the ability to automate things and build workflows to do things that eliminate toil and redundancy for our employees,” Hayes said.

And with many organizations struggling to maintain or hire new talent, especially in IT, this was critical for the county, “People feel so much more empowered and have so much more worth when they are doing things that are intellectually rigorous and challenging versus when they are just repeating the same mechanical actions over and over and over with very little thought,” Hayes said.

“Our ITSM is our entry point to our entire IT organization, and we want our employees to graduate out of this area into other roles within our organization – network technicians, client services, desktop technicians, developers and project managers,” he continued. “If all they’re doing is handling tickets and doing the same mundane, manual tasks over and over that’s not particularly great training. So investing in tools that allow our employees to engage in meaningful work is something that’s important to us as an overall IT organization.”

And Pima County isn’t the only organization trying to improve its employee experience through IT automation.

Automating IT Service Management Can Improve Efficiency

Automating IT Service Management is the wave of the future for organizations looking to move quickly and efficiently through the digital landscape.

By automating manual tasks, IT professionals can free up time and resources to focus on bigger-picture strategies and emerging technologies.

When you use an automation and integration tool like iPaaS (integration platform as a service) with your ITSM tool you can supercharge your automation capabilities. With this supercharge automation you can guarantee your team is operating in a streamlined way. What’s more, you can get comprehensive analytics, allowing you to improve services with comprehensive data; find bottlenecks or pain points; and understand where your IT team needs to focus their energy to positively impact your end-user experience.

Implementing automation in ITSM may initially require some set-up work but ultimately leads to better resource utilization, improved performance metrics, enhanced production quality and happier customers – which is why it should be a no-brainer for any business looking to optimize its infrastructure.

Using automation to reduce the drain on IT resources and provide a better service experience is one of the key initiatives for digital transformation in the financial services industry. And to achieve success in this area, you need the right people, processes and technology in place.

“We’re lean and mean,” Deborah Rojas, Chief Information Officer for Charter Oak Financial said. Her department supports the IT needs of 300+ financial professionals and nearly 200 other staff with only a handful of full-time employees.

With TeamDynamix ITSM, the practice optimization team has created a single point of contact for IT and other types of support: a “one-stop shop” for people to get help.

“We had a merger three years ago, and people are still trying to learn names, functions, and responsibilities,” Rojas said. “Seats changed, and responsibilities changed. So, we said, let’s just keep it simple and use one email address and one phone number. With that, we’re providing the simplest way that people can find an answer to their questions.”

Automated workflows help ensure that IT service tasks are completed in a timely manner, and Rojas and her team have full visibility into the status of service requests—as well as the data they need to measure the team’s effectiveness.

Besides improving the ticketing experience for users, Rojas’ team has also streamlined offboarding processes, and they’re now working on transforming onboarding and developing the knowledge base.

“When you think about bringing someone into an organization, there’s so much that needs to be done,” Rojas said. “We want to help that person feel welcomed into our organization, understand the entire platform and who to talk to. We need to think bigger and bolder and then have some consistent way to deliver that experience, and TeamDynamix lines up well for that.”

Automating IT Service Management Can Reduce Errors

Automating ITSM is a great way to help reduce errors, both human and technical, in any organization. Human errors can be reduced by automating mundane tasks such as data entry and updating firmware. Automation can also help identify technology glitches before they become major issues.

A well-structured system of automation can also help to flag potential mistakes as they happen, which gives the team a chance to fix them before any harm occurs, allowing for tremendous cost savings down the road.

It’s important to remember that automation isn’t a silver bullet and requires proper implementation and monitoring. However, it can be extremely beneficial in not only reducing mistakes but in preventing costly downtime due to system malfunctioning or new services taking too long to deploy.

Automating IT Service Management Can Increase Customer Satisfaction

Automating IT Service Management can help organizations increase customer satisfaction by enabling them to address customer inquiries efficiently and quickly. With automation, tedious tasks like opening tickets, assigning to the right technician or department, following up with customers and escalating cases can be automated and completed with greater accuracy and speed.

Instead of waiting days for a customer inquiry to be responded to, an automated system could answer a question within minutes. Automated systems also provide more consistent results as customer inquiries are addressed using predefined steps instead of relying on manual labor. As a result, not only do customers receive faster resolutions but they also benefit from better quality service which can lead to increased satisfaction.

In Oklahoma City, Business Systems Manager Dusty Borchardt credits well-defined processes and solid ITSM software for the city’s success in the modernization of its IT service desk.

With about 100 people providing IT services for more than 5,000 city employees, the IT department needs to work efficiently. TeamDynamix ITSM has allowed them to do so by streamlining the delivery of IT service through automated workflows.

“TeamDynamix has brought simplicity to our operations,” Borchardt said.

Using tools within the platform, Oklahoma City IT staff have created a self-service portal linked to an expanding knowledge base. City employees can find answers to common problems and frequently asked questions within the knowledge base, and if they can’t resolve their own issues, they can submit a service request through the portal.

Based on the nature of the problem they describe; their request is routed automatically to the appropriate IT team for a response. “Our goal is that use of the self-service portal will continue to grow, reducing our call volume and emails to the IT service desk,” Borchardt says.

Automated workflows also ensure that important tasks aren’t overlooked when IT staff are busy. For instance, when new city employees are hired there are many steps in the onboarding process. With TeamDynamix, the entire workflow can be initiated with a single service request that is routed automatically to the various departments. The same is true for requesting purchases and managing IT contracts.

“Before TeamDynamix, we had employees emailing requests directly to our administrative group within IT, and that was causing some issues,” Borchardt says. “Sometimes requests would fall through the cracks, and months would go by without anyone noticing.”

Using TeamDynamix has helped Oklahoma City’s IT support teams realize their vision for using industry best practices to improve the delivery of IT services.

“We adopted the ITIL framework more than 15 years ago. We’ve had effective processes in place for a while, but we haven’t had a decent toolset to manage them until now,” Borchardt concludes. “This is the first IT Service Management platform we’ve implemented that everyone loves to use.”

Automating IT Service Management Can Help You Scale Your Business

IT Service Management does not have to be tedious anymore. Automation through modern ITSM tools and iPaaS can help companies quickly identify and resolve IT service issues, allowing them to grow their business faster and with greater efficiency.

Automating ITSM helps organizations reduce their costs and increase their speed of response to customer needs, which allows them to scale effectively and serve more customers without making additional investments in personnel.

Automation also improves accuracy, ensuring that organizations are giving customers the best possible service. With automation streamlining their workflow, businesses can focus on expanding into new markets or releasing new products to remain competitive and achieve greater growth.

By automating IT Service Management, you can save time and money, improve efficiency, reduce errors, increase customer satisfaction, and scale your business. If you’re looking to automate your ITSM, TeamDynamix can help.

To learn more about how we can help you automate your ITSM check our eBook: Automate IT – A Playbook for Supercharged ITSM.