IT Service Management Best Practices: Automating ITSM

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Automation is a hot topic -- especially within IT organizations. Yet despite its popularity, nearly 41% of businesses say they are struggling with excessive manual processing and lack of IT Service Management (ITSM) automation, according to a recent market study.

In that same study, businesses list both a lack of IT automation and a heavy reliance on IT to administer ITSM as the biggest challenges facing IT organizations right now. And in today’s age of digital transformation -- where automation and workflow management are the foundation of ITSM success -- this makes sense.

IT teams that can manage the high influx of service requests while automating the most time-consuming and repetitive tasks are the ones that can maximize their resources and provide end-users with better service and less friction when it comes to service management and service delivery.

What’s the best way to manage these requests and automate them? By using an ITSM platform that includes the option to add no-code integration and automation (iPaaS) functionality. Aside from automating repetitive tasks -- here are a few other ways iPaaS with ITSM can reduce drain and keep both employees and customers happy:

Supercharging Your ITSM -- Start Here with Automation

From password resets and name changes to more complicated processes like onboarding and offboarding -- the question we always hear when it comes to automating ITSM is “Where do I start?”

One of the most impactful places to start can be within Human Resources and the onboarding and offboarding process for employees.

Imagine this -- you’ve just received a signed offer letter back from a candidate and you’re ready to start the hiring process. To kick off the automation you log on to your organization’s service portal and click a button that says, “Onboard New Employee.” You click that button and fill out the information needed (employee name, start date, etc.) and hit submit.

From there a workflow kicks off and automates a whole process that creates an employee profile, creates a security badge, sends an equipment request for a computer and sends a welcome letter to the new employee with all the information needed for the first day. This is all done automatically and seamlessly so that when they arrive on day one they have everything they need.

Automated ITSM Making a Difference in Pima County

At Pima County, they’re using ITSM with iPaaS to integrate systems in IT and beyond and to automate processes like onboarding/offboarding and more.

“We are starting small, hoping to use automation to take tickets and automatically deploy software to endpoints, to onboard and offboard users with Active Directory and distribution groups,” Mark Hayes, information technology leader at Pima County, said.

When it comes to onboarding new hires, the county’s goal is to have new employees arrive on day one with everything they need to get to work, “You don’t need to waste so much time when it comes to onboarding,” Hayes said. “It really is such a sour experience for a new hire to come in, in this day and age, and sit around for three days waiting on their computer to show up. We need to get out of that mode and iPaaS is going to help us do that.”

In addition, using iPaaS to automate offboarding will save countless hours for a process that is normally very manual and heavily audited as Pima County is a government entity.

“As a government organization we get audited by the state every year and they want to know what these stale accounts are doing sitting here,” Hayes said. “Offboarding is currently a very manual process -- having to review the list from HR of people who are no longer employed with us and manually revoking their privileges from all the different systems and software and disabling their accounts. There’s absolutely no reason for that to not be automated. iPaaS is going to help us a lot with this and save us time.”

Andrew Graf is the Chief Product Strategist for TeamDynamix. His passion lies in helping organizations thrive in an ever-changing environment. As a co-founder of TeamDynamix, Andrew is well versed in the common issues facing IT leaders– as the need for increased IT Maturity rises, he is able to help map out a way forward.