In the IT Service Management (ITSM) field, many incidents and requests are repetitive despite being needed for business needs. Tasks like status updates, approvals, password resets, and outbound notifications are extremely tedious for IT organizations and service desks to conduct, giving them less time to handle more important tasks within the organization.
Fortunately, there are many tools that service management teams can utilize to automate repetitive service requests, incident requests, incident management, and other tasks. With the right ITSM tools, many ITSM processes can be automated while being able to achieve business goals.
However, automating various aspects of your IT Service can be a daunting task, since ITSM teams and IT service desks need to handle many separate processes and tasks. ITSM implementation of automation, therefore, needs to start small, with the automated workflow and tasks starting with the top ITSM processes and business needs.
Many IT service desks and help desks are feeling the need to automate their ITSM processes. In a recent survey sponsored by Bright Pattern on ITSM innovation, 72% of respondents, all of whom were ITSM technology decision makers, expressed plans to add automation software to their ITSM and ITSM framework. But many also expressed that adding automation might be difficult.
To start automating your IT service delivery and workflows, start with your top three use cases. Automating the right ITSM processes can improve performance in your ITSM, and improve performance in the entire organization. For many help desks and IT Service desks, the #1 use case is password reset. Password resets often make up the largest portion of incident and service requests that a help desk or support team receives. Automating password resets frees up your service desk to handle incidents that are more important. Automating repetitive tasks like password resets have shown to have reduced call volumes by 20-30%, and end users can be assured that they are able to reset passwords 24/7, 365 days a year.
Another top use case to start with first is smart routing for escalations. Routing end users to the right resource as quickly as possible makes the workflow and your ITSM infrastructure more efficient, leading to more effective problem management and change management in your IT team. Finally, one last top use case for many service desks is automating outbound notifications. Automating outbound notifications to end users of things like outages, performance issues, and service updates can free up your IT analysts, empowering them as well as end users.
To implement the right ITSM framework and ITSM processes in your organization, you need the right ITSM tools for the job. Check out Bright Pattern’s latest ITSM and ESM Trend Report for how you can adapt your IT organization to the demands of 2021.
