More than three decades have passed since Stephen R. Covey made the world highly effective.
His 1989 bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, inspired just about everyone. How could anyone pass up the chance to become highly effective by adopting just seven new habits!?
Just like Covey taught us all how to develop and grow as people, and even reach all new potentials, here at Resolve, we believe organizations are just as capable of becoming highly effective … in no more than seven new, or improved, best IT practices.
In the future-focused world of IT, automation advances just about everything, businesses included. By opting for automated processes rather than settling for manual work, companies can save massive amounts of money and be on the receiving end of big-time benefits.
Organizations over the last few years have pretty much had to welcome, and adopt, new technology just to maintain operations and meet customer expectations. The most successful companies; however, jumped at the opportunity to implement automation and make it part of their business strategy. The eagerness and adaptability of these companies helped them get in front of a steep learning curve at a time when new technologies could disrupt almost every process in an organization, Forbes reports.
How can IT automation empower businesses?
IT automation can generate exponential gains for the business as a whole. With a sharp focus on results when automating and orchestrating IT tasks and processes, IT can be the key catalyst of moving the business forward.
Doubling IT capacity, cutting operating costs in half, overcoming talent gaps, left-shifting to self-service, and enhancing customer experiences all represent IT automation’s power to drive business transformation. Examining strategic goals of an organization, then automating according to those objectives, is a sure-bet way to produce desired business outcomes.
To help you get ahead, we’re outlining the top seven automations that empower organizations to achieve bigger goals, realize their full potential, and revamp their business strategies.
1. Automated Password Resets: The Effortless Way to Get Employees Back Online
They might be the simplest IT ticket of all time, but password resets seem to come in droves, over and over again. Because these high-volumes tasks demand so much of IT’s time, password resets steal unnecessary resources from the business, and the costs stack up in no time.
The average IT helpdesk labor cost for just one password is $70. Think about the astounding number of password resets needed in a year, from employees, online shoppers, and more, on top of the lost productivity, and the negative business impacts become clear: a direct hit to revenue, poor employee and customer experiences, and a crowd of security concerns.
Automating password resets will make a remarkable difference for IT teams, enabling these notorious tickets to become self-serve, and allowing IT to maintain oversight on crucial areas like governance and security – those that affect the business most.
2. Automated Employee Onboarding: The Gamechanger for New Hires and IT Teams
Employee onboarding can be a dealmaker … or breaker … for retention of top talent. The onboarding process includes more tickets than IT teams have time for, which means unnecessary challenges for HR, too.
Automation has a very direct impact on the employee experience. Unlike manual processes, it shrinks the time it takes to onboard new employees down to just a matter of days, fully equipped with all the systems, utilities, infrastructure, and hardware they need to be productive. Efficiency like this creates nice ripples in the business, such as better experiences for new team members and people requesting IT services, and creates additional levels of positive business outcomes.
3. Simplicity Just One Click Away: Automating the Many IT Tasks of Employee Offboarding
There’s no clear checklist in sight for IT teams during employee offboarding processes. Instead, a thick mystery novel of tasks comes with the logistics, cutting access to company resources, and other post-exit activities.
It’s far from employee onboarding in reverse. Offboarding, when done poorly creates major security concerns, and IT teams have to shift priority to proper management of multiple systems, controls, and more.
Automation can ensure the company’s safety from potentially malicious hackers by running health checks on the organization’s domain, and then cleaning up any accounts that show up on the scan. Automation benefits the business by protecting the organization’s proprietary, confidential information once an employee leaves, and maintaining a barrier from systems and software, and the possibility of a security or privacy breach.
4. Resource Provisioning in 10 Minutes or Less: What Really Has to Happen?
Provisioning a server is much, much more than just … well … provisioning a server. The process includes tasks and steps that require completion by external teams, and so there can be a forever-long wait for a response. When done manually, resource provisioning can put IT teams far away from any kind of finish line. Plus, IT has evolved from having to support applications and workloads on-premises to a combination of cloud, multi-cloud, and more, and so things get much more complex.
Automation; however, takes over many server provisioning tasks and their associated actions. It can eliminate the chance of human error, help keep things current, expedite the handling of a ticket, keep up with SLAs, and more.
The switch to automation can transform the state of the business, too, which most likely means optimizing resources, lowering costs, and improving employee and customer satisfaction. And because it’ll always be top of mind for business leaders, automation can put a pep in the ROI step, as IT teams are continuously expected to do more with less. The investment in IT tech will drastically drop the time and effort needed for multiple tasks, increase productivity, and augment efficiency.
5. Low Disk Space Remediation: Triaging the Explosion of Data and Closing the Loop
The “explosion of data,” as we like to say — cloud, containers, DevOps, and more — leads to the unavoidable low disk space in the data center, and quite possibly, an outage. The data overload sets off alerts, events, and other signals for IT to triage. And too often, it’s more than IT teams can handle without technology. It takes too much time, and it becomes too late to take an action.
Automation is the speed machine IT teams need for tackling the supersized workload. Automatic remediation can take less than a minute! Team efforts can be redirected to bigger tasks that deliver business outcomes, like truckloads of time saved, massive cost reductions, and maxed out productivity.
6. Scaling Up to Keep Costs Down: Automation for Web Application Incident Management
Web application incident management, paired with today’s boom in business demands makes automation a no-brainer for IT teams and their organizations. Having to reach higher marks, IT teams find themselves with task lists that simply cannot be done by their human members, no matter the size of their roster.
And so there’s downtime. We’re talking downtime that comes with a price tag of $145,000 – $450,000 per hour. Incident management doesn’t mean what it used to. There’s no more 24/7 rotation of IT staff. It no longer scales and companies must mitigate the downtime spend.
Automation can transform KPIs and the success of incident management, including metrics like system uptime and SLAs, meantime to identity (MTTI), meantime to resolution (MTTR), and of course, cost and efficiency. These improvements can evolve organizational strategies to reach bigger business goals.
7. 5 Steps to An Easy, Error-free Load Balancer Sanity Reboot
The load balancer sanity reboot is one of the best use cases where automation is imperative. It’s only done every three to six months, but because of the time and steps it requires, mistakes are easy to make, and really, the process itself tends to get overlooked. The organization; therefore, throws out time and money that it could have held onto.
When automation takes over these long, tedious hours of the load balancer sanity reboot, IT teams become free of a vicious, burden-filled cycle of never-ending tasks. The entire organization benefits as well. Automation eliminates the need for manual work, and preserves valuable time and money that the organization can spend on strategic business initiatives.
Stephen R. Covey’s bestseller got Resolve’s wheels turning. We spoke with the industry’s leading subject matter experts and found out how organizations, too, can become highly effective. The seven automations we’ve outlined will help transform IT and businesses for the better. All in one place, you can find video demonstrations of 7 Automations for Highly Effective Organizations and see for yourself how the magic happens.
