It started slowly. At first, there were some notable trends toward digital workspaces, remote employment arrangements, and the proliferation of task-simplifying work applications.

But then, lightning struck in the form of a global pandemic.

It hyper-accelerated those trends and irrevocably changed the role of IT in companies across most industries. The IT team is no longer simply fighting bushfires day to day; they have become a strategic partner at the heart of the business.

The key to successful #ITSM is working smarter, not harder. Click To Tweet

Turning ITSM into IT Service Delivery

Ready or not, like it or not, the spotlight today is on IT. The department must be able to support all the novel business apps and workflows their company is dependent on in today’s complex professional environment.

But the impact of changing norms is not limited strictly to IT. Other organizations within a company can be considered service providers as well, with digital tasks, tools, and processes that need to be managed or coordinated.

Consider the marketing department when someone needs to, for example, write a smart, insightful, witty blog that you absolutely must share with all your colleagues immediately. Or think of HR when they onboard a new employee; or legal when they need to review contracts and collect signatures; or finance reporting on budgets; or procurement teams working with suppliers. There are several cross-departmental intersections in all these workflows, as well as some specialized applications that come into play.

That means IT service management (ITSM) needs to grow and mature, becoming more efficient and easier for everyone. Many IT professionals have recognized that automation is one of the most important methods of reaching that goal. From tasks to tickets, workflows to self-service, automation helps deliver faster service, lighten workloads, and streamline the user experience.

The key is working smarter, not harder. We call it Service Automation.

Service Automation and Starbucks 

Service Automation permeates every aspect of service delivery, handling all the heavy lifting until ITSM is basically running by itself. Tickets are closed. Tasks are finished. Users resolve common issues on their own. Entire workflows do their thing. And IT personnel can focus on what they do best.

Kind of like Starbucks.

Bear with me on this.

Ticket Automation

Your order has to get to the right barista, the one who knows exactly how you like your coffee.

Ticket Automation sorts, routes, and sends each incoming ticket to the right desk, without the need for manual intervention. Based on customized parameters, which can include the source of the ticket and tailored fields, every request is automatically prioritized and assigned to the most appropriate person or resolution group within the organization. No muss, no fuss.

Task Automation

Do you think the barista actually makes the coffee from A to Z? Of course not. There’s a machine, what you might call the autonomous barista, that does a lot of the work for them, so that they can concentrate on using their skills for the more complex tasks in making your drink.

The manual, repetitive tasks that tend to take up so much IT time every day can be made to “automagically” disappear. With a single click, routine work can be fully automated – and then promptly forgotten about. IT team members can then spend more time on bringing value to their business and less on resetting printers, creating new users, and the like.

In this blog @SysAid looks at how good service automation is just like Starbucks #ITSM Click To Tweet

Self-Service Automation

Sometimes, you want to make your own coffee. That’s when you’d go for Starbucks self-service, adding just the right mixture of coffee, sugar, and milk.

Give most people the tools and knowledge to quickly resolve issues on their own and they will. As consumers, they have come to expect easy, automated fixes – click, search, or chat, and it’s done. That’s self-service automation. It empowers users while ensuring IT is not bogged down. A classic win-win.

Workflow Automation

Every barista is seen as a “partner,” working in coordination for better service. As a result, the most complex drink requests can be made simple with a streamlined system.

Workflows involving different tasks, teams, departments, and applications can be completely automated from start to finish. Complex processes such as employee onboarding can run seamlessly all on their own, with various permissions and actions triggered automatically, practically eliminating human error and saving time for everyone. In short – less work, more flow.

The Strategic Value of Smarter ITSM

Smarter ITSM, thanks to Service Automation, can help pave a clear path for the IT department to become a much more strategic partner in any organization. All that’s needed is to leverage the operational excellence introduced by automation for three main purposes.

• Provide anywhere, anytime service to employees, so they can work and collaborate in the environment that best fits their needs. This means supporting various systems and applications (Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.), as well as technology for working from home, at the office, in the airport, on the train, or anywhere else. Their experience of IT should not fall short of what they expect as consumers from Uber, Amazon, and WhatsApp.

• Connect all the business’ applications and people, so IT can deliver service across workflows intelligently and smoothly. This includes coordinating technology and solutions purchased independently by employees in various other corporate departments.

• Leverage lessons learned for transforming service delivery across the company, as more and more departments are expected to deliver service digitally. With years of experience, IT leadership is in a unique position to share the rules and processes that work, as well as to tailor the tools of digital service (such as SysAid) to the needs of other organizations.

From HR to procurement and everything in between, automation makes things run more efficiently and effectively. With the advent of Service Automation, IT teams are no longer stuck running in place, focusing only on maintenance. Instead, they can become a force driving innovation across the digital workspace.