The Role of Automation in ITSM -Some use cases

IT Service Management also known as ITSM is a widely followed paradigm for managing information technology resources and services. The question arises that why businesses prefer to implement automation in the IT service management in the first place. The answer lies in the ease of use and efficient utilization of resources. The most important are the cost and money associated with it.

IT has the ability to empower organizations through process delivery and policy mechanisms. It provides a more structured approach to improve service management and increase accountability and transparency at the industry-wide level. It can help to implement new functionality that can drive customer satisfaction to the next level.

Are you wondering which processes of IT source management could be automated to get advantages?

I will write 5 of the real-world use cases especially at the 1st/2nd Level Support to get a better understanding. Here is the curated list of some tasks that can be automated to have a greater benefit.

1. Password Resets

Many calls to help desk pertains to the issues of password resets. Many users forget their passwords and the help-desk is their savior. The stringent cyber regulations and laws has strengthened the password requirements. It now demands higher complexity. But this results in many users simply forgetting their password.

The process of resetting account passwords can result in a waste of resources, which sometimes can also lead to customer dissatisfaction, compliance vulnerabilities, and end-user frustration. Besides this task is highly repeatable and obviously it can be automated.

Besides the cost that is spent on this process, the time which IT personnel are spending to support these lockout issues adds another variable to the equation. But this is not going to be the same with automation.The users can generate a ticket or can visit a self-service portal and this process can bypass the role of help desk.

2. Data Management

Data management makes an important part of any organization. Data is important for business intelligence and decision making and it gives the competitive edge in a cut-throat environment. But data leakage can lead to a catastrophe. That is why data management is so important.

The access management to data can be automated with the help of Identity and access management system that can assign roles and revoke them based on a set of criteria.The data management automation can essentially remove the role of 1st level help-desk and the users can manage their access on their own.

Migrating data between an organization’s system is another classical use case. Many companies are in the process of migrating their data from on-premise to cloud based solutions. The scripting languages like Python can really help us in this regard. The scripts can be defined along with the processes that can automate the complete data migration.

3. User Account Management

Most companies have identity and access management systems (IdM) to manage the systems and end users alike. All electronic or digital identities are managed by such systems. In the past this process was creating the manual overhead. The help-desk users were used to literally add the information by hand in the active directory.. But many companies are opting for the automation that will ease the process. The self-service portal can be developed for such process that will automate all of these tasks.

Creating user accounts as a part of the job of on-boarding employees is a repetitive activity that is equally time-consuming. Most importantly, as the organization will grow the complexity and volume of the tasks associated with the services of user account management will increase.

4. User Notification Emails

The automated emails can educate the end-users regarding the offered services. Moreover it can inform the end users regarding the regular services that the organizations are offering. The notification emails can be generated when:

i) The user’s password is about to expire.

ii) The user has changed the password.

iii) The user has subscribed or unsubscribed from some services.

iv) Security related issues like unauthorized access etc.

v) Hardware provisioning and the management of Device life cycle.

This process includes the predetermined rules and structured information and for that reason this process can be automated with ease. This is a burdened and a manual back-office procedure which is involving plenty of emails daily with an average time handling. But now businesses can make this highly efficient and cost-saving by automating this process with the latest automation tools.

5. Configuration Management

Configuration management is important to identity the organization’s critical assets. CMDB (Configuration Management Database) is an important tool in this regard. Adding and managing the assets manually, especially when it comes to the large organizations is not only difficult but impossible at times. So this really needs the process automation. CMDB is also a fundamental part of the ITIL.

All items weather hardware or software in this system are known as Configuration Items (CI), The CI Identification, its inclusion and exclusion in the database can be defined on the basis of certain parameters. Since CMDB is a complex system, so its automation is a challenge as well. Not all component can simply be automated, rather some components can be integrated at first and then the rest of the components will follow.

One example is the auto-discovery on the network whereas the hardware components can be identified and discovered on the basis of MAC, IP and Vendor based information.

Automation can also be included to the Device life-cycle management of all CIs, where the system can trigger the appropriate responses like contacting the vendor or the relevant department within the organization to undertake maintenance or necessary tasks.