ITIL Service Desk

Role of Automation and Analytics in your IT Service Desk

Consider a scenario where your organization grows to a level when it has thousands of employees using several assets in terms of hardware, software and resources across departments. How would you go about ensuring that everything works well with no productivity losses? You would require an IT Service desk to handle all the IT and systems issues faced by your workforce. Next question that comes up is how to go about managing the IT service desk in the most optimized manner. Generally, it begins with a run-of-the-mill ticketing system unless the decision is made after a careful deliberation considering the long haul.

With the technological advances and rampant migration to cloud technologies, the incidents and problems are likely to change over time. So, the system to manage the IT service desk must be agile and future ready. The Help Desk not just automates a part of incident reporting and resolution tracking but goes a notch up in reducing the manual intervention, cutting down the problem resolution turnaround time, increasing efficiencies and using analytics to prevent problems or automating oft repeated tasks and processes. The idea is to leverage workflow and task automation and employ Big Data analytics for process improvement.

Let’s try to list down the key values and benefits that IT Service Desk automation / analytics must bring:

Process Compliance: Meeting globally-acclaimed standards is not a branding call. It invokes trust, reliability and seamless integration too. So, the service desk solution you adopt must be compliant for standards such as ITIL.

Lower Cost and Effort: The primary reason for automating any process is to save cost by reducing manual intervention in repeatable tasks that can be automated. A good IT service desk management system must be smart enough to identify the recurring and high-volume requests so that they can be moved to self-service mode. In this way, the power of knowledge management can be leveraged to assist users in troubleshooting on their own for low severity, mundane or repetitive issues. It can help in providing a set of procedures that help check and filter down to actual problem, thereby saving the diagnostic efforts by a system engineer.

Track Resources and Assets: An effective service desk automation tool must be able to effectively maintain a record of all the resources and assets at an organization with details such as procurement data, utilization data, user data, and shelf life. An important area is that of software asset management. It is important to track all the software licenses and their utilization to ensure compliance and control IT spending.

Predict and Prevent: It is a well-known fact that many problems can be prevented well in advance if they are predicted and rectified before the incident occurs. A robust, agile and intelligent service desk system may help in predicting the service performance based on the service level goals. Using big data and analytics, it is possible to take informed decisions about assets, resources, IT procurements and infrastructure expenditures.

The points discussed above may be viewed as the tip of an iceberg in terms of the advantages of using automation and analytics in your IT service desk vis-à-vis a normal ticketing system. Get in touch with SapphireIMS team to know more about the offerings in this segment that can transform your service desk performance on counts profitable more than one.