The IT landscape today is constantly evolving both in terms of business environment and technological landscape. While at the same time most of the processes in IT operations are still manual intensive and repetitive. With the help of RPA technology IT managers can streamline such processes to increase their process quality, improve operational efficiency and effectiveness and in turn reduce overheads while enhancing the productivity. Moreover the advantage of the technology is that it can be integrated with the existing infrastructure at no extra cost.
Much of backup and recovery management, patching updates including validation and testing, and ticketing updates are routine and repetitive tasks which the employees find very mundane. hence these are typical processes which can be assigned to the BOTs while the employees can be assigned to tasks which provide a sense of satisfaction.
Research shows that nearly half the help desk calls are requests for password resets. This process is a prime candidate for automation since these requests for password resets are highly transactional, repeatable, have constant structure, and few exceptions. This is achieved with BOTS armed with specific templates (request, acknowledgment, etc.), having access to the IT service management (ITSM) tool for active directory activities. Upon receiving the reset request the BOT classifies the service request based on the priority defined (High or Low) based on the urgency. It then logs into the Citrix app where it resets the password and sends the new password to the user and marks the status of the service request as resolved. Help desk team is notified in case of any exception which then is processed manually.
For large organizations managing user credentials across multiple or diverse information systems is a major operational challenge as well as a cost arising from maintaining a large IT team to handle such tasks. RPA helps by allowing bots to handle activities like account creation, email address creation, etc.
On receiving the user profile information in the form of a daily report template, the BOT with access to email exchanges and the ITSM tool, can use that information structured in accordance with on-boarding templates and generate a service request. It can then set up an exchange account, provide the default access credentials, notify the HR/Reporting Manager about the creation of the accounts. Help desk team is notified in case of any exception which then is processed manually.
Sending of notifications involves structured information and has predetermined rules and hence can be automated. In most organizations this is a manual back office process which involves manual sending of hundreds of email notifications daily with the help of Exchange, Excel and ITSM tool making it complex and inefficient.
Using RPA in this instance, the BOT when triggered logs into the ITSM tool and captures the pending cases from a report and sends emails as per user preference. Help desk team is notified in case of any exception which then is processed manually.
Using RPA, the BOTs using automated diagnostics can select the issues that can be remedied by means of simple, rule based algorithms. Complex processes requiring decision making can be moved to the service desk to be done manually by the IT teams. Due to the accuracy and availability of the BOTs, this automation reduces the response times significantly and thus increasing customer satisfaction.
