Editor’s Note: This blog follows Part 1 of a two-part series that recaps our first-ever “Ask Me Anything (AMA)” webinar. Find questions 1-4 here.
Part Two
With a limitless load of questions on IT automation and the industry’s biggest trends, Resolve’s “Ask Me Anything (AMA)” session went about tackling them in an all-new way. We threw out the preparation, we threw out the scripts, and we asked our community to submit the questions that matter most to them and their organizations.
Part of our leadership team took the hot seat and provided answers in real time, sans dress rehearsal. Their responses addressed the community’s top concerns and curiosities.
Below you’ll find a recap of the questions and answers, along with links that take you to deeper coverage of each topic.
5. What top tasks and processes can be automated to get the greatest time and resource savings?
It’s often a combination of pain points, but the lowest hanging fruit for automation includes hitting toil and tasks that are prone for error, like employee onboarding and offboarding, server provisioning, incident and alert checks, and using false positive data to either repair an issue or escalate a ticket.
In fact, some Resolve customers have seen an 80 percent reduction in their L1 workloads over time.
Next, those teams in AIOps for some time now have been looking at AI to correlate events and alerts and reduce noise, which frees up people on the network team.
READ MORE: Accelerated Remediations: How to Maximize AIOps Investments in Network Operations
Injecting automation in these AIOps cases enables automatic alert detection and diagnostics, getting the appropriate information about each one, and then either escalating it to the right person immediately or auto-remediating it. Auto-remediation can be a lot more tangible than people might realize. Pairing automation up with AIOps, where it narrows down the types of events they see, allows for streamlined, auto-remediation with minimal to no human intervention.
6. What does the roadmap for IT automation look like?
The roadmap for IT automation forks in a couple different directions. It’s always about making processes easier by looking at more parts of them to automate and being able to touch more systems. And Resolve constantly works to integrate with new systems on a regular basis.
The first goal of a roadmap is to reduce the barrier to entry for automation so teams don’t feel as much pressure to automate everything all at once. Connecting automation to the business value is becoming even more important because of distributed teams, the volume of requests, and how they’re addressed, which shifts attention from individual tasks to end-to-end process automation, like employee onboarding and device provisioning.
But ultimately, it’s multifaceted when improving IT processes while providing the best experience of new integrations.
In today’s era of multi-cloud environments and all eyes on the experience your organization provides, orchestrating IT processes helps to ensure demands are met. Successful orchestration starts with a full understanding of the end-to-end process and mapping it out according to information gathered from service blueprinting.
A DEEPER DIVE: Service Blueprinting and Orchestration for Elevated Customer Experiences
Successful orchestration stems from completely understating the end-to-end process and mapping it out according to what your business needs first. This insight can come from different teams (AIOps, ITSM, NetOps, ITOps, etc.) to learn what they’re doing and how. While planning out each part of your IT automation roadmap, a process improvement cycle of standard operating procedures (SOPs) starts to emerge where automation can be applied.
7. What are the impacts of Generative AI (GenAI) on automation and service orchestration, and is there an opportunity to use GenAI to create those services?
GenAI does two things well include explanations and looking across large data sets. Simply put, we’d say natural language processing (NLP) and categorization on a faster trained clip are areas from where a lot of value will come.
GenAI is increasingly being leveraged to look at a complex error or event log and summarize it for a user in a meaningful way for which they can act — or it acts on its own — which is what all companies seem to be striving for right now.
We have high hopes AI can build the automation for you, and it’s heading that way. As we better train AI on what it takes in the automation building blocks that make up Resolve, we’ll be able to provide you with a conversational way to build a workflow using large language models (LLMs) and the building blocks already on our content exchange of hundreds of integrations.
WATCH: AI and the Future of IT Automation: 3 Power Moves to Harness the Hype
8. How do you support test, maintenance, tuning of a solution?
Of course, automation efforts must start somewhere. At Resolve, we see automation as a flywheel, wherein it all starts with understanding the solution, identifying the problem, and considering what to automate. The next step is designing the solution, implementing it, and from there, measuring it as to reveal areas for improvement.
EXPLORE: The Resolve Automation Flywheel: A “Good to Great” Automation Journey
There are four “Ds” of automation that are helpful to know:
- Discover
- Design
- Develop
- Deploy
A scenario for example, would start with looking at your tickets and Resolve’s pre-built workflow templates, which picks out which tasks and processes should be automated.
The reusability of the automations and workflows changes the game, because they allow you to design and deploy one whole automation and then let’s say that automation has parts that other automations need. It means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, the design and develop portions of the flywheel gain speed and deploy automations faster. You can measure them, and on Resolve’s ROI Dashboard, you can understand whether an automation brings value. If it’s not driving your desired value, you then have the option to quickly pinpoint where the issues is or replace it with an automation that’ll save more money for your company, as well as provide benefits like greater security and customer experience.
9. What about the platform design and development with Resolve and different approaches you can follow?
Reusability and repeatability are the name of the game. Resolve focuses on making the process of building an automation easy (cue the flywheel to make it even easier).
We spend a lot of time in thought leadership and exploring how to take business approaches and practical approaches to solving problems. With reusability and repeatability in the tool, Resolve’s workflows and templates start you at the point where it makes sense according to your individual goals and automation journey.
The platform also offers activities for building a process and integration to your own homegrown tool. Then to take it a step further, you can build your own activities as custom code, turn them into automation building blocks, and then give them to non-developers to reuse. There’s a cycle of reusability on every level, from workflow level and reusing workflows with other workflows, to the activity level to reuse activities to build customized workflows, and then to the custom coding level that’s brought from an environment that’s specific to your business priorities and even turn those into more building blocks to be used along your automation journey.
The full session is available on demand! Check it out: “AMA: Unwrapping the Gifts of IT Automation & Orchestration.”
