What is Self-Service Automation?
Self-service automation has become a major buzzword in the IT community; it is changing the way organizations work and the way people do their jobs. Taking a self-service approach to IT Automation offers countless benefits to individuals and to the organization as a whole, for example:
- IT departments and end-users will both experience time savings and increased efficiency.
- Non-IT users will be able to resolve problems and get up-to-date information without the ongoing help of IT, improving time to insight and facilitating a better partnership between IT and the end-user.
- Organizations will see an overall improvement in productivity.
It’s becoming widely known that self-service automation poses many benefits, but the question many people are still asking is what exactly is it? Self-service empowers non-IT users (business users, help desk users, analysts, etc.) by giving them the ability to proactively take on daily and ad hoc processes. These processes could be anything from HR being able to onboard new employees, to analysts querying data or generating reports with current parameters, to running secure file transfers, and so much more.
Relying on IT’s intervention every time one of these processes needs to be run results in inefficiency and frustration for both the IT and the business user; IT can’t get to their critical tasks and business users cannot carry on with their daily processes until the task is completed by IT.
With self-service, thousands of use cases are easily implemented by IT for the user community so that they can more easily perform their responsibilities without requiring IT’s involvement, thus improving time to insight. And by empowering business users to accomplish these day-to-day processes on their own, IT will save themselves the time it would take to wait for IT to get to their ticket, simultaneously freeing up IT’s schedule and allowing them to get to the more critical tasks.
Now if you’re in IT, the thought of turning some of these processes over to the business user could keep you up at night. However, when self-service is properly levied, IT is left in full control of jobs, privileges, and security. This means that IT sets up the workflows and specifies which individual users or departments can have access to any sensitive information or have the ability to run a particular authorized workflow.
Self-Service Automation: Easier for IT?
You may have read in our previous blog posts that the IT Resources Gap is becoming more of an issue than ever before. Computing resources have gone from expensive and scarce to highly available and extremely affordable, and finding IT staff that can keep up with the increasing demands of the industry is harder than ever. This means that demands on IT have increased tenfold, and with the ever increasing amount of new technologies that IT must manage, IT departments have simply not been able to keep up. IT departments are shorthanded and always busy, they need a way to relieve some of the pressures and tasks that they are experiencing every day.
With self-service automation, IT can offload many of their daily tasks to the end users themselves, making the lack of IT human resources just a little bit easier to handle. With self-service automation, business users are less frustrated and more productive, IT can focus on critical tasks, and collaboration between IT and non-IT is improved.
Read about self-service automation and watch our video to learn more, here:
