Accelerating Digital Transformation through Automating IT Managed Services

By Nilesh Gupta, Vice President & Global Head – Digital Infrastructure Management Solutions & Strategy (IMS)

The evolution of digital technologies such as Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) is having a significant impact on IT within enterprises. By 2020, a staggering 20+ billion connected devices will be in place, which would be about three times the size of the current world’s population, enabling us to crave for a perfect synchronization with just about everything around us. You will need to decide if you are one of the early adopters of technologies that will drive your business just ahead of your competition, working with the newest and most advanced solutions and leaving your competition to play the catchup game.

Transformation today begins with digital Infrastructure and data is the key theme within the orchestration layers of digital infrastructure. Enterprises have been accumulating data and literally have not even come close to exercising the real worth of it. Empowering business with actionable information can fundamentally change the way business can operate and transform. Here is where automating managed services operations will accelerate digital transformation journey within an enterprise.

So what are the areas one can possibly apply intelligent automation within the IT operations framework? Let’s look into the top three areas where automation is already underway.
Automating Service Desk Operations: We need to relook at how enterprises engage service desk for end-user support. With digital transformation accelerating at very high speed, information technologies are changing rapidly in the way businesses are getting done today. With rapidly changing technologies there are high turnover of services desk engineers that leads to lack of knowledge and experience. This leads to high risks and low quality of services. Besides providing a 24x7 support takes a toll with the costs going north. Enterprises can look into building AI / RPA into their service desk support operations. In fact, with roughly 30-40% of Level 0/1 services desk support cases being repetitive, you can leverage the power of Natural Language Interpretation (NLI) and cognitive automation in the form of AI bots. AI powered RPA and cognitive automation are quickly becoming the main driving force for digital transformation today. Traditional service desk and being transformed to Digital Service Desk providing end users the flexibility to talk to someone anytime from anywhere with 50-70% reduction of costs to handle each incident.

Automating IT Operations Management: Modern enterprises that are adopting Hybrid-IT will need a solution that will allow them to discover everything they have in real-time. Auto-discovery of IT assets and complete visibility of all your IT resources, no matter where they are will also require automation in management of incidents. Automation in streamlining the process of creating and managing incidents, as well as notifying the right teams with correlation between the resources in real-time basis, it becomes even more important on how you handle the false positives from here on. Escalation and alert on critical events to ensure rapid problem resolution and consistent service performance will lead to meaningful insights to providing the actionable information to the CIO organization to better manage the business of IT today.

Integration of RPA/AI in IT Operations Management: The network operations center or the digital command center (as I would like to put it in today’s scenario) is the focal point for a 24x7 IT Infrastructure /Application and Data Monitoring and Management. With everything-as-a-service, connectivity becomes the principle driver for any digital journey. Ensuring health of these connected devices to ensure 24x7 availability is the key element for a greater customer experience (CX).

Enterprise will need to plan to bring in RPA that will perform health check (including security checks) of systems and applications and take corrective remedial actions to ensure the environment performs giving the experience that is needed. Automation on service requests post work-flow approvals coming out of IT service management needs to be automated.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is the important step in the evolution of new business models since it significantly reduces the need for IT service agents to perform routine, rule based, high volume activities, enabling them to instead focus on more innovative ideas.

 Thinkers, enthusiasts, market researchers and many others place 2020 and 2025 as an important milestone in the coming years. Is this because of ‘conversational’ banking, ‘self-driving’ vehicles, and ‘drones’ to deliver packages?  You are talking to ‘robo-advisors’ on market trends and investments, ‘cognitive’ coach on your phone designing your next day diet based on your previous days workouts and the list keeps adding up. To make all this a reality, enterprises that develop or adopt such innovation must have their IT Services automated to handle the kind of demand in implementing Hybrid IT in their journey of digital transformation.