Wouldn’t it be great to have a playbook that helps you prepare for 2024 and as a bonus, thrive during the coming year?
The IT landscape isn’t going to stop evolving.
The need to get proactive and embrace new technology isn’t going anywhere.
Meanwhile, strategy and innovation are everything.
The IT environment’s challenges and opportunities demand leaders to get in front of whatever might come. IT automation is paving the way for enterprises to get ahead in 2024, and so Resolve’s experts provided strategic, in-depth automation designs and practical guidance in a webinar, now available on demand.
Find the webinar here and watch at your convenience. For now, we’re giving you a sneak peak of what we’re calling “4 for 2024,” covering the four must-haves for success:
1. Automation Fulfillment: Don’t Stop at Request Intake
Automated request fulfillment gets the top-of-list spot.
For a service desk of a modern enterprise, for instance, countless inbound requests including new accounts, access to shared network drives, password resets, and more give IT too much work to handle on their own.
Most enterprises today use chatbots on the front end to facilitate inbound requests, while automation fulfills those requests on the back end. The sooner employees and customers can get their requests met, the better their experiences will be, and that bodes well for organizations looking to thrive in 2024. Any external event can kick off automation inside of Resolve, whether that’s from a chatbot, ticket, text message, an email, an alert, or on communication platforms like Teams and Slack.
Consider the banking experience, as an example. Chatbots and automation work together to expediate resolutions, often times without human intervention. Alternatively, when a human is needed, chatbots enable customer service agents to obtain account information and gather recent transactions to better understand the customer’s needs, leading to a reduction in wait time, and a better customer experience.
2. Make the Best of Generative AI
Generative AI (GenAI) has been growing in popularity since its inception, as it seems to surprise us with constant developments and features. As such, we’re expanding our use of GenAI to make things easier, get answers to just about every question out there, save time, and more.
But the difference GenAI can make for IT won’t go unnoticed. The talk about machine learning (ML), AI, large language models (LLMs) never stops. In the context of IT automation, at the basic level, GenAI provides solutions to issues based on historical data and offers recommendations on how to resolve the problem at hand. Ultimately, this enhances outcomes quickly and efficiently beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.
EXPLORE: ChatGPT for IT Teams: Resolve’s AI Code Translator Gives Automation a Boost
Organizations and their IT teams have the future and its unpredictable growth, as well as twists and turns, top of mind. They’ll likely turn to augmented automation more and more, and really start incorporating it with their existing automations.
Looking forward to 2024. It’s evident machines will execute an increasing number of IT tasks, complement the work IT does, and perform work that exceeds human capability, the McKinsey Global Institute says. Technological progress will continue to push the frontier of what AI and automation can do. When harnessed, they enhance performance and productivity, leading to more achievement in much less time – a must in 2024.
3. Self-correct Human Errors
Automation powerfully lowers the chance, and occurrence, of human errors.
Automated self-healing and automated remediation serve IT teams very well. In telecommunications, for example, automation changes the Network Automations Center (NOC) game when it comes to reducing false positives and preventing the burnout they cause. It also gets proactive in preventing outages, automatically dispatching tickets, blocking the chance for wasted time, and setting card failures and switches up for future success.
In the telecommunications industry, where NOC teams are managing huge environments, self-healing is imperative.
As previously noted, new technology developments like those of AI and LLMs drive fresh initiatives and add value to self-healing. The emerging intent-based networking (IBN) concept is an example of self-healing, as it observes network patterns, capabilities, and volumes, and makes decisions based on a company’s policy.
4. Get Proactive: Orchestrate Complexity and Consistency
IT’s ability to orchestrate complex steps and actions, and stitch them together into a cohesive workflow frees teams up from worrying about human errors and instead, gives them reliability and consistency.
One proactive automation that Resolve’s customers often use is the load balancer sanity reboot. When you think about trying to reboot a pair of load balancers safely, there is a lot involved from a manual perspective. Sanity reboots are often scheduled pretty far in advance, to happen regularly, for processes that keep the lights on. It can be part of a change request to do so, or it can be part of a larger playbook in trying to repair, resolve, or diagnose an outage. The many components and requirements of a load balancer sanity reboot exceed what a human can feasibly do without error.
In this case, orchestration of a risky, drawn out process ensures greater reliability. Generally speaking, orchestration joins silos, develops a process improvement cycle, and multiplies the value of automations that are already in place.
WATCH: A Load Balancer Sanity Reboot in Action with Resolve
What Makes IT Automation Software Successful?
Resolve, according to current automation trends and a seemingly nonstop craze over efficiency and productivity, focuses on end-to-end automation across all of IT. Several key features enable a successful automation center for excellence, along with a well-oiled, functional software solution.
The top benefits include:
Platform Functionality: Simply put, it has to work. The automation software has to be tried and true and have a presence in the industry that’s long enough to take user feedback and then deliver its best abilities to end users.
Ability to Customize: It’s something that can vary across the automation software marketplace: having off-the-shelf automation playbooks and built-in integrations, but somewhat being “boxed into a corner” when it comes to the types of actions users can take. In a perfect world, the automation possibilities are endless with any degree of customization available.
Data Manipulation: Automation software must be able to deal with many different types of popular formats, whether it be querying a database table or hitting an API with XML coming back, and also have the ability to natively work with each format as a seamless, out-of-the-box feature.
Third Party Integrations: This feature comes with the territory, one might say. Across all of an organization’s infrastructure, its service desk, network operations, and more, the automation software can integrate with hundreds (if not thousands) of prebuilt integrations.
Governance and Security: Automation software will touch an organization’s devices and applications, so IT has to make sure access is controlled.
