Working in IT is getting harder – our Future of ITSM Survey 2019 showed this – and the old IT service management (ITSM) mantra of “doing more with less” is no longer enough. Instead, there’s a need for IT service delivery and support to be “better, faster, cheaper” to reflect the growing importance of technology to business operations and outcomes. Plus, the higher expectations of business stakeholders including employees and customers.

For your IT department to improve across all three of the aforementioned “better, faster, cheaper,” there’s a need to provide even greater support to your ITSM personnel and their work – especially IT support staff. In particular, there’s an imperative to remove many of the high-volume, low-value tasks to allow your service desk agents to focus on more valuable, and personally fulfilling, work.

Let your ITSM people do what they do best

Research has shown that IT departments spend 30% of their time on low-level tasks. It’s something that must change if IT departments are to better meet both business and employee expectations – and their rising expectations at that.

There’s a need to free your people from the burden of repetitive low-value – tasks that keep them from what’s really important to both the people and business operations they serve and support. Let automation take even more of the strain of IT service delivery and support.

Automation per se is not new for ITSM

ITSM tools have traditionally used workflow automation capabilities to help people to work within processes, and to help the work progress as efficiently as possible. It’s certainly saved time and costs for many organizations and allowed them to deliver higher quality service and support.

But there’s still more that can be done to reduce, and regain, the time wasted on repetitive tasks – such that service and support staff can then focus on work that improves the end-user experience and creates additional business value.

The opportunity your IT department has here is service orchestration – which automates the delivery of low-level services, and consequently frees up your IT staff up to work on more beneficial activities.

The benefits of service orchestration

As with other forms of automation, service orchestration allows your teams to focus on what’s really important while also improving against “better, faster, cheaper.” With the key benefits including:

• Faster service delivery and support – reducing cycle times to speed up the delivery of services and to slash the mean time to resolution (MTTR).
• Increased service agility – not only are results and outcomes delivered faster, automation also offers 24×7 capabilities (including via self-service) and the results are more predictable when you automate manual, error-prone tasks.
• Increased agent productivity – saving service desk analysts time that can be better spent on more valuable activities.
• Enhanced end-user experience and productivity – employees and customers want to be treated well and they want speedy service and support. Here, automated solutions for things like user-provisioning, client software distribution, and password reset ensure that existing employees are more productive, and new employees are productive on day one.
• Improved control and compliance – the centralized logging of all automated actions provides a full audit trail that fulfills the needs of both internal and external auditors.

Introducing: Automate Joe

Automate Joe is a new service – a service orchestration engine – from SysAid that delivers these benefits. Orchestrating the delivery of low-level services such as the provisioning, updating, changing, and de-provisioning of service components.

Whereas many automation tools are siloed, Automate Joe is built into SysAid for ease of use when orchestrating tasks in systems and applications outside the SysAid environment. And, importantly, from a single point of control.

According to a recent EMA report sponsored by SysAid – “Automation, AI, and Analytics: Reinventing ITSM” – one of the main obstacles with automation is a lack of integration between ITSM platforms and other IT applications, which results in piecemeal scripts and products spanning internal and external applications, and ultimately unreliability and failure-based issues.

Automate Joe rises above these common automation issues

Automate Joe is powered by the market-leading CA Automic Service Orchestration and addresses these common issues by orchestrating tasks within the business, application, and infrastructure layers. All at the push of a button and using proven automation scripts that are easy to set up. This enables your IT teams to automate many of their manual tasks to drive up employee productivity and reduce ticket resolution and provisioning times. Importantly, there’s also transparency, with full version control such that everything that’s orchestrated is fully documented.

By freeing your service desk agents from the burden of manual tasks, Automate Joe will improve employee productivity, accelerate IT and business processes, and significantly reduce your IT service desk’s ticket resolution times.

Automate Joe’s capabilities

Automate Joe orchestrates many types of processes, including:

1. Automating employee onboarding and offboarding in Windows Active Directory and Azure Directory
2. Provisioning and de-provisioning VMware virtual machines
3. Automating workflows for Microsoft Exchange mail systems
4. Deploying software via Microsoft SCCM server
5. Automating SFTP file transfers

Plus, much more. Also, Automate Joe integrates with open source and public cloud solutions from OpenStack, Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, and VMware, enabling your IT teams to orchestrate the delivery of hybrid cloud services. And you can continue to use your IT automation tools from Puppet, Chef, and VMware alongside Automate Joe.

If you’d like to find out more about Automate Joe, please watch this webinar recording to find out how this new technology can benefit, and work for, your organization.