Service Automation and Workflows

Service automation allows customers to automate actions based on certain triggers/conditions.

When attempting to follow best practices, as outlined in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines, it’s useful to automate key tasks in service management and ensure they’ll occur quickly, accurately, and without unnecessary human input. Across a large organization, it’s important your IT service desk implements best practices as efficiently as possible.

Certain parts of ITSM are often repeated and therefore more easily automated. This includes initial ticket processing (ticket categorization and assignment), directing clients to self-service channels, and resolution analytics.

Because service desks often receive more requests than they can handle, IT service automation offers benefits to both technicians and employees. This can reduce the number of human errors, increase execution speed, lower operational costs, and lighten workloads for IT staff. Meanwhile, automation allows you to handle an increased number of tickets and most importantly, deliver an efficient and enhanced employee experience.

Service automation accelerates IT management processes and increases productivity. Automation allows you to create customizable rules to automatically make routine decisions based on data input, speeding up service processes, and empowering your organization by saving time.

Usually, areas requiring precision, consistency, and 24-hour functioning are ideal for automation. For ticketing systems, automation can eliminate errors and help centralize service tickets, delivering them to the right personnel. Combined with the power of artificial intelligence, automatically selecting the category of a ticket ensures employees and technicians can help facilitate routing processes.

Ticketing services can benefit significantly from automation when tickets and/or service requests are in high demand. Automation then allows these tickets to be routed to the right personnel, with alerts sent out to notify these teams of new tickets and changes to existing incidents.

By simplifying the ticketing process, automation ensures the tickets are more accurately and efficiently routed. It also guarantees effective management by ensuring tickets are tracked and centralized in a single location. 

IT service automation improves service delivery in multiple ways. Since IT services are often overstretched, automating parts of services can save resources and reduce costs. When service desks receive high volumes of requests, they need a consistent, 24/7 method for ticketing and routing. Instead of hiring more personnel, which can be inefficient and costly, service automation directs incidents and service requests to the relevant IT teams.

Service automation improves ITSM processes by increasing the capacity for ticket generation. Instead of having representatives who can only work set numbers of hours, automated systems can work around the clock to route tickets. This can be extremely important when you’re running a global business and receiving requests out of sync with your IT department’s normal hours.

Automation can also improve services by making ticketing more accurate. Representatives may note the wrong information or neglect to include useful information on the service ticket.  

Additionally, service automation can be a way of monitoring your processes. By automating ticket routing, you can easily check your performance for problems and bottlenecks. You can also set up your automated system to send out alerts when service level agreements (SLAs) are in danger of being breached. This can make your service desk more efficient and improve the quality of the services you provide to your employees.

Automation provides many benefits to IT service delivery, and it can be used to improve efficiency and eliminate human error during any stage of the ITIL lifecycle. ITIL is an adopted and recognized body of knowledge on IT service management, and it provides a best practice framework for managing IT services.

Automation can fit best into the ITIL service management lifecycle when it delivers and replaces manual services that are repeatable, rely on accuracy and routine, and don’t require human interaction. Implemented during the right stages, service automation can save resources and lower costs for the organization while enhancing employee service experiences.

Automation fits into the continual service improvement stage of ITIL service management by helping identify aspects of existing services not functioning properly. Service automation helps notify administrators and relevant personnel when a problem has occurred. Finally, automation improves the delivery of existing services by reducing IT workloads and therefore eliminating the need to train new personnel. 

Service automation in SolarWinds Service Desk automates processes within your service management strategy to reduce repeat work and make it easier for your team to get work done.

It offers many benefits designed to improve existing services. These automated capabilities give you the tools you need to build rules capable of driving efficiencies with ticket routing, workflows and approvals, alerts and more.

You can automate ticket routing to ensure the information recorded is accurate and complete, and tickets are directed to the right technicians in your organization.

SolarWinds helps you improve service delivery and apply ITIL best practices. You can formalize your departmental processes, remove bottlenecks and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Automated workflows ensure teams are aligned and able to efficiently complete requests.

With SolarWinds Service Desk, you can prioritize important issues and apply SLAs with automated notifications. You can also build processes and notification rules to prepare your team with the details needed to quickly resolve SLA breaches or critical events impacting your IT infrastructure.