All too often, the Kelverion team hear that businesses are trying to deliver more services with less resource, all whilst meeting tight Service Level Agreements. There are many automation use cases to relieve this pressure, and this article explores the six use case examples driving automation adoption within service management.

Joiners, Movers & Leavers

Joiners, Movers & Leavers (JML) is one of the most painful tasks for overloaded service desks to process. The creation of accounts for new employees or temporary workers, adjusting access for users moving roles and terminating IT accounts for those departing your business are labour intensive activities that require senior staff who have the necessary systems access and expertise to perform.

The delays inherent in manual fulfilment cause huge business impacts when new starters don’t have the access they need and security risks as user access is not removed on the date someone actually leaves the company.

Using a self-service interface, the Personnel Department or Line Manager can submit requests to onboard or off-board someone; the automation platform then executes all of the JML IT actions required, automatically, in minutes.

Office 365 Management

Office 365 saves companies the headaches of operating Exchange, SharePoint and Teams infrastructure. However, the management of users and permissions is still laborious; from creating users to adding users to groups, assigning a license, to disabling a user, the automation of these tasks releases pressure on the service management team.

Like JML, Office 365 Management requires senior staff who have the necessary systems access and expertise to perform. The key is to provide a self-service interface for anyone to submit requests, controlled via an existing change management approval process; the automation platform executes the Office 365 Management requests automatically in minutes.

Standard IT Tasks

Many day-to-day standard tasks are completed manually by IT staff. Even in the unlikely scenario that the workload of this isn’t an issue, these tedious tasks will be impacting the morale of the service desk team, whose time could be spent better elsewhere.

Adding Users to Active Directory Groups, stopping and starting a virtual machine, diagnostic actions such as a ping or traceroute check and remediation actions like restarting a Service; these standard daily tasks can all be easily automated.

Virtual Machine provisioning

Using virtual machines to run different operating systems, test applications and back up data has been game-changing for IT agility, but manually creating and managing these VMs takes time. Automating the provisioning of VMs is another instance of where automation can save your organisation time, money and speed up delivery from days to minutes.

Virtual machines are built and managed securely through self-service requests, ensuring that IT remains in control of these assets.

Patch Management

Patching servers is critical to ensure that IT infrastructure remains secure. However, completing patching manually is complex and time-consuming. Most organisations have a combination of Windows and Linux operating systems and have struggled to find a patching solution covering both platforms. In addition, monthly patch deployments can be an unreliable process; it is, therefore, essential for a reporting function to identify when a patch deployment has been successful to ensure that servers remain secure and compliant. Automating Patch Management allows teams to schedule patch deployments, manage exceptions and patching issues rather than every single patch deployment.

Self-Service Software Delivery

Our final automation use case example is; the automatic installation of software. Requesting the installation of new software and fulfilling that request in an enterprise setting is a time consuming, labour intensive and slow process. It typically involves the user raising a call with a helpdesk to log the software request; the request is then processed and allocated to a senior member of an IT resolver group to add the end-user to a software deployment tool group to action. This can and should be automated.

Empowering the End-user

One of the most exciting advancements in automation is the implementation of the self-service portal. All the above use case examples can be completed by the end-user; via the submission of the request through any self-service portal.

Not only does this reduce call volumes, but it also delivers a modern experience for the end-user, something which is becoming expected in the workplace and will exceed the expectations of your internal stakeholders.

About Kelverion

Kelverion specialises in Service Request Automation and offers organisations automation solutions, integrations and supporting services. Kelverion’s solutions wrap around your existing ITSM tool and enable organisations to harness the power of automation in the service management space without changing your Service Desk, delivering a 400% return on investment over the first 12 months. For more information or a demonstration, please get in touch or visit www.kelverion.com.