As technology becomes more integrated into the everyday operations of businesses of all sizes and levels of complexity, managed IT support services can help businesses evolve their approach to tackling a variety of time-consuming manual IT tasks.
Automation is increasingly helping businesses grow their profitability and become more efficient and productive with their time. Automation of mundane, repetitive tasks and interdepartmental workflows allows teams to keep pace with the demands of the modern digital economy. At the same time, automation frees them up to do more precise and meaningful tasks that contribute to broader business and technology goals.
By using automation, IT professionals can streamline many manual aspects of core managed IT support services, spend more time on meaningful tasks, and stay better aligned with the goals and expectations of a digitized business landscape.
Technology leaders can assess which tasks could be streamlined or fully automated to achieve greater efficiency and accuracy. Chances are this approach could extend to many common tasks done within the context of managed IT support services. Consider starting with these core IT tasks.
Deploying new software through an automated software request system can save time and money in the long run, allowing your IT department to avoid getting bogged down by these requests. An automated system ensures that only necessary software is deployed when specifically needed.
Unnecessary software is never deployed onto the network using this system, allowing the process to become more efficient while providing more rapid and precise solutions. These systems can also bundle requests for new employees.
When it comes to hardware requests, streamlining the process with automation can alleviate the burden on IT personnel. This can include tracking a request, reviewing it for approval, checking whether a part is available or needs to be ordered, and assigning the hardware. This drastically reduces the number of manual steps the IT team has to take to fulfill these requests and allows them to respond more rapidly.
Automating daily management tasks can help an IT team be more organized, less redundant, and better able to put their skills to use in meaningful ways. It also helps companies suffer fewer costly mistakes due to human error and lets them better achieve their broader management goals. Here are a few of the manual management tasks from which IT departments can benefit by automating.
· Order management
Order management consists of managing the lifecycle of a purchase from the moment a customer buys something to the moment the order is complete. An automated order management system allows you to streamline procedures for confirming orders and shipping details, generating invoices, and ensuring the right orders are shipped at the right time. You can also use automation to monitor inventory.
· Release management
The stages of releasing software, from development and testing to deployment and ongoing support, can take a tremendous amount of time and resources from IT departments. Automation helps inform key decision-making and helps you deploy software more rapidly while minimizing risks and errors. Automation of testing increases data security within a reliable production and pre-production environment.
· Incident management
Incident management is a task flow where time is of the essence—except when it’s not. Major outages or incidents may require lots of resources and attention, whereas less critical incidents may be able to wait if more pressing ones need a response. Automation allows you to prioritize incidents and recognize and respond to them more quickly and efficiently.
Many applications can be integrated to share data and improve interdepartmental workflows. Yet, while you may be able to easily integrate popular and mainstream software, it may be less simple to do so with other programs and apps that are older or built in-house. Automation can help you streamline and optimize the flow of data across all apps and departments more broadly, transmitting data from one application to the next. This allows you to configure workflow integration in a way that works best for your company and scales with your needs while reducing the time your teams spend on these tasks.
Manual data entry is a task that takes a lot of time, and even when it’s outsourced, there comes a potential for mistakes that need to be corrected and can be costly for companies. Automation allows you to extract data from a variety of sources, such as PDFs, documents, and websites. You can extract only the data you need by using algorithms to recognize key data points, validate that data, and enter it into the appropriate fields. Automating workflow integration between different applications also helps to eliminate redundancies when data is entered into different programs, as this data is shared across platforms automatically.
While managed IT support services encompass much more than the traditional “help desk” approach, there are a variety of common issues that IT teams face that take up a lot of their time. These tasks often include a lot of repetitive manual labor and thus can benefit from automation. Here are a few examples.
· Resetting passwords
This is a common support ticket request. While it’s not a difficult task for IT to help with password resets, it is time-consuming. Automation can be used to reset passwords without compromising security, thus freeing you up to focus on other more complex issues.
· Changing permissions for employees
When an employee leaves or changes their role within a business, their permissions and access levels should also change. When employees leave the company, you can automate the process of terminating their access across various assets and accounts. When someone enters a new role, you can use automation to automatically reassign old permissions and grant access to necessary network resources for the employee’s new role.
· Automated support ticket management
While it’s not all that IT departments do, the process of fielding support tickets can take up a significant portion of their day-to-day work activity. Automated support ticket management systems can ensure service requests are assigned to the person who is most appropriate to solve a particular issue. Meanwhile, employees can enter a support ticket through various channels and receive an email confirming the details of their request.
More and more companies understand the value of managed IT support services.
Managed IT support services are teams of dedicated technology experts who understand the needs of your business and how to interpret and apply data to help you achieve your goals. In today’s technological world, the break/fix approach of traditional IT departments isn’t enough to keep pace.
Vudu offers the knowledge, experience, and dedication to help your business integrate automation in a way that helps you further your goals and helps you scale your automated systems as your company grows.
At Vudu, we are technology wizards who want to bring IT magic to your business and achieve supernatural results. Do you want to start automating within your business? Tell us more about your goals.
