Businesses today need to transform and automate their company and IT processes, including their service desk, but many organisations fear costs, complexity and change, should they make the leap. In fact, digitalisation and automation is an investment that delivers measurable returns across budget, staff retention, operational efficiencies and customer experience, especially in IT service management, says Dawn Megens, Director at TauLite.
Digitalisation of processes
A key business case for digitalisation and automation is any paper-based or manual transaction that slows processes due to time spent waiting for feedback, approval or more information, Megens says: “Processes can be fast-tracked and better measured and managed once you have properly defined and digitised them, enabling continual improvement, reporting and providing access to automation, integration and artificial intelligence.”
She adds that an access control process is a prime example of processes that should be digitised and automated, to optimise access requests to systems and information. With new legislation it has become a requirement to manage and report on access to systems and personal information. Having a historical report of who requested access, the approval of the access and the actual access or account creation and modification are not negotiable anymore.
“Another good use case is the staff onboarding/off-boarding process, which is particularly time-consuming where staff turnaround is high. Not enabling new staff to start with the necessary tools and access right away result in expensive non-productive time, waiting. Digitalisation and automation help ensure onboarding and off-boarding is fluid, staff are equipped with all the necessary tools and permissions timeously and all staff are removed from all systems when they leave the company,” she says.
Digitalisation, a gateway to automation
Megens says: “As South Africa, along with the rest of the world, was forced into a new way of working, we had to ask ourselves key questions: Were we prepared for the future, with adequate measures to seamlessly drive our companies remotely and effectively? Were our companies resilient enough to survive the evolution of the industry? And if not, what should we be doing to be at the forefront of developments in the ITSM space?”
She notes that companies have to move towards a digital future, all the while cutting costs in the technology area to accommodate for the rapid fluctuation of economies. They need more agile and accessible solutions that enable end-users to help themselves.
“The world is becoming more mobile and dynamic, and through digital transformation, we can drive employee productivity, better customer engagement and business growth/resilience. Enterprise processes and specifically ITSM need to adapt to this evolving environment and cater for these changing needs,” she says.
Digitalisation of processes provides the platform for implementing automation. Digitisation with automation answers the need to support self-service and improved experience, as well as reducing costs.
However, there have been concerns that this could impact staffing and the future of humans in the IT industry. Says Megens: “In fact, the ideal should be to augment enterprise processes with digitisation – not replace it. The aim must be to increase capacity and enable humans to work smarter, and reducing cost.”
Unpacking ITSM digitisation
As an example, having implemented an industry accepted ITSM platform means that a company’s ITSM processes have been digitalised. Requests are logged, incidents are categorised and tasks are assigned, changes are tracked, all electronically.
What does it mean to have a digitised ITSM process? "In a nutshell, ITSM can be measured and reported and be enhanced by adding automation, artificial intelligence, integration to smarter tools and processes," Megens says.
Smarter tools
The pandemic brought people together through meetings, chats and calls to collaborate and automate business processes through a single application – Teams.
Megens says: “Though Teams is well constructed and structured, the conversations, posts and chats in these Teams rooms can often remain in the platform, unattended to and un-actioned. What if we could integrate the content emerging from these meetings seamlessly into our ITSM tools, logging tasks and tracking the chats? If the knowledge shared in these meetings was tracked in your ITSM solution, you’d close the gap between ITSM and the Teams tool.”
AI-enabled automation
Moving from digitised processes to smart automation using artificial intelligence is the next step in digital transformation, Megens says, noting that effective use of AI will shift the use of human resources from lost time on tedious, repetitive work, to productive work that involves rapid innovation. “The end result will be proactive prevention, faster restoration of services, empowered staff, improved staff retention and an enhanced customer experience,” she says.
AI enables the use of chatbots or virtual agents to expedite self-service capabilities, remove the bottlenecks at your service desk, drive down call centre call volumes and wait times, and help agents resolve priority/high severity issues first, she says. It also supports RPA integrations that take the burden of repetitive and time-consuming tasks like password resets and log clearing away from your service desk support staff, so they can focus on higher priority or complexity tasks.
Megens says: “While adopting AI has many benefits, one needs to always keep the customer in mind when considering the adoption. Well-defined ITSM process, a clearly articulated knowledge base and a well-managed configuration database (CMDB) will make automation and the adoption of AI much easier.
“Digitalising company processes is the key to the digital market of the future. As the digital market evolves, more cloud vendors are offering solutions that continually add new functionality and features at low costs, which means organisations can keep innovating and improving enterprise and ITSM processes, resulting in better service and motivated employees,” she concludes.
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