IT transformation using robots and artificial intelligence tooling
According to Gartner, “Through 2024, enhancements in digital workplace infrastructure processes driven by analytics and automatic remediation capabilities will refocus 30% of IT operations efforts, from support to continuous engineering”.
The adoption of AI and intelligent automation technologies in the IT function can bring significant benefits in terms of cost reductions, employee experience, and revenue growth.
IT automation can reduce service delivery times and enhance the productivity of valuable, and often costly, IT resources.
Having a future-ready IT function that leverages advanced technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent automation (IA) helps free the IT team of tasks that could be done more efficiently and cost-effectively by robots and artificial intelligence tooling.
Below are the 8 top use cases for intelligent automation in an IT function, but many more use cases exist.
User Management
IT staff must create user accounts, and grant access and permissions to applications, systems, and shared folders while onboarding new employees. They also need to update and add user details to multiple IT systems, applications, and databases.
The task of creating a new user account and updating user details manually is time-consuming and cumbersome for IT professionals. RPA bots can automatically receive account creation requests, create usernames, generate passwords, and send email notifications to users when they are set up.
RPA not only speeds up the user account creation process but also helps avoid hiccups related to delayed resolutions or manual human errors. This reduces business operational costs.
Service Desk Automation
Service desk handles labor-intensive tasks such as end-user support, security operations, IT tickets, etc. Service desk automation can provide AI-enabled self-service capabilities to users providing a quick resolution for IT tickets.
For example, business users might ask a chatbot to deploy software on their desktops. The chatbot might use intelligent automation to match the request with company rules and auto-authorize the deployment of the requested software. AI can be trained to automatically create a knowledge base for future automatic service desk ticket resolution. Service desk turnaround time can be reduced by up to 90% and operational costs reduced by 25%.
Password Reset
By providing end-to-end automation, a password reset process can be streamlined without manual intervention. Password resets are the simplest to do, but their sheer volume takes a toll on IT staff productivity.
Automation can free up IT staff for more complex tasks and reduces turnaround time from multiple minutes to seconds e.g., RPA can reset passwords and email new access details to the team freeing IT professionals to complete more productive work without interruption.
Data Access Management
Access management aims to grant authorized users the right to use a service. Intelligent automation helps reduce the probability of human error as it ensures that user authorization is accurate. It can also be used to automatically save and record user activity, revoke specific user access right, deliver efficient security audits, and avoid security breaches with users forced to follow a predefined set of rules.
Systems Health Check
A system health check provides a snapshot of the overall performance of a computer system at a point in time. But monitoring the status of IT devices, and services or are tiresome tasks to handle manually. Intelligent automation processes and task-mining technologies enable the automatic documentation of all steps in a workflow for future investigation or statistical reporting. This significantly reduces the time capture and recording of process flows and flow data for immediate examination by IT engineers who are now able to make data-driven decisions in real time.
Email Notification
Manually crafting and sending hundreds and hundreds of email notifications on incidents, incident resolution, system alerts, data access management, service desk ticket status, and other IT incidents disrupts service desk agent productivity. RPA robots can proactively send emails to alert IT staff using predetermined rules applied to structured data. This decreases processing time, improves service desk agent productivity, and frees employees to work on more complex, value adds tasks.
Server Disk Space Management
RPA robots can alert IT teams when server disk space is low, and they can be programmed to take immediate corrective action to remediate this issue. IT service desk staff can quickly diagnose and resolve the issue proactively, reducing the turnaround time to enhance customer experience.
Data Management
Intelligent automation can reduce IT operations costs and overheads by eliminating manual errors. By applying AI technologies such as machine learning or AI-powered OCR, IT engineers can make tasks like data entry, capture, creation, and update faster and more efficient. Smart automation has the capability to connect internal systems with any external source for data processing. Automation simplifies data management workflow, reduces IT operations cost, and increase ROI when applied correctly.
Conclusion
Dedicated IT teams often struggle with the level of manual effort required to maintain the uptime and upkeep of information technology systems across the organization. Yet IT professionals are now expected to deliver expanded digital technology services to business leaders on a daily basis.
The most progressive IT teams are empowered to operate as strategic business partners who perfectly align exceptional digital strategies to business strategy.
They are doing this by using RPA and intelligent automation have as key drivers of value to automate critical IT processes.
This frees IT professionals to work on more strategic, challenging technology projects that are more deserving of their time and talent.
Are you ready to automate your IT function? Get in touch today by visiting www.irpaai.com/iac
Links:
Originally posted on 2023-02-21 in the IRPA AI Network — Intelligent Automation