Did you know the average IT worker spends up to 10 hours a week – that’s one whole financial quarter per year – on completing manual tasks that should be automated? These are tasks like onboarding and offboarding users, name changes, department changes, password resets, etc.
In fact, a recent market study from InformationWeek revealed that 58% of organizations say their IT team dedicates more than five hours per week (six-and-a-half work weeks annually) fulfilling repetitive requests from the business. Alarmingly, 90% of respondents say that manual and repetitive IT tasks contribute to low morale and attrition in their organizations.
This is a trend that hasn’t gone unnoticed, and it’s one of the reasons Pima County brought in TeamDynamix for IT Service Management (ITSM) and iPaaS.
“TeamDynamix is a place where we are really trying to kickstart and accelerate the ideology that automation with the right tools can bring value not just to IT, but to other departments within our organization,” Mark Hayes, information technology leader, said. “We’re starting in IT, so that they can see the possibilities as we move forward with our digital transformation and expand outside of IT.”
Pima County made the switch to TeamDynamix for IT Service Management (ITSM) after using a different system for the last 10 years. Traditionally, the county has taken in tickets through email, phone and a service catalog with base-level triage, but with TeamDynamix in place, they will be able to leverage self-service and automation to better serve its citizens and reduce the drain on employees and resources.
“Prior to TeamDynamix, we didn’t have the ability to automate things and build workflows to do things that eliminate toil and redundancy for our employees,” Hayes said.
And with many organizations struggling to maintain or hire new talent, especially in IT, this was critical for the county, “People feel so much more empowered and have so much more worth when they are doing things that are intellectually rigorous and challenging versus when they are just repeating the same mechanical actions over and over and over with very little thought,” Haye said.
“Our ITSM is our entry point to our entire IT organization, and we want our employees to graduate out of this area into other roles within our organization – network technicians, client services, desktop technicians, developers and project managers,” he continued. “If all they’re doing is handling tickets and doing the same mundane, manual tasks over and over that’s not particularly great training. So investing in tools that allow our employees to engage in meaningful work is something that’s important to us as an overall IT organization.”
Supercharging ITSM with Enterprise Integration and Automation (iPaaS)
With TeamDynamix now in place, Pima County is looking to automate and integrate as much of the manual ITSM processes into workflows as they can.
Low-code/no-code automation tools like iPaaS are a great way to automate and integrate systems across an organization and reduce the toil, allowing your organization to be more competitive and nimbler with less friction and a better end-user experience.
iPaaS centralizes all integrations into one hub with a library of connectors to common systems such as Workday, Oracle, your IT Service Management (ITSM) platform, Salesforce, the Active Directory, Azure, and hundreds more, as well as any APIs. With all systems connected and data points now secured in one spot, end-users can leverage the platform to move data, transform data, and build out automation and workflows using a visual flow builder that can be triggered from a field change, form fill or any number of actions.
“That’s something the organization is really just starting to comprehend as a vision that we want to get to overall,” Hayes said referring to automation. “My goal and hope is to make sure people understand the possibilities of workflow beyond just getting approvals routed because that’s all that we really do today.”
A Need for Data Governance and Automation Organization
And while automation is key to overcoming the challenges of reducing scut work and improving the morale of the IT teams working to address integration and project backlogs while still delivering on services requests – it needs to be done right.
The market study found that when it comes to automation within organizations:
- 53% of IT teams manage 100 or more applications across their organizations.
- 30% of IT teams task 50 or more system admins to support all of these applications.
- 78% of system admins are building integrations across their application portfolios.
- 69% of system admins are building workflow and automation on top of this application infrastructure.
- 60% of teams spend 10 or more hours per week (a whole financial quarter of people-hours) working on internally developed scripts to manage IT systems and processes.
So, while all of this automation is great, when it’s done ad hoc by IT teams building their own scripts or home-grown solutions using a variety of APIs, it can cause more issues.
In fact, according to the study more than four in 10 respondents to the survey said they spend at least five hours a week developing home-grown scripts for automation between and within applications and writing scripts for workflow and automation. That means that IT workers are spending more than six weeks a year tending to the care and feeding of internally built automations.
This works well in limited situations, but at scale, the DIY mentality quickly creates its own IT administrative headaches within organizations.
For example, when system integrations are being built over and over again by different groups or employees (due to attrition or other reasons), often with little governance over the process and no documentation, this creates a chaotic environment as systems come and go, and various pieces of infrastructure need to be rebuilt or pointed at different applications that might have bespoke automation built on top of them. This is cumbersome to navigate and introduces big downtime and security risks if change management is not handled properly.
It also often depends on knowledgeable superstar employees with institutional knowledge to keep the whole house of cards upright. When those people leave the organization, many times the automations they built fail.
The best way to create standardization around your integrations and automations is to centralize them around a single enterprise integration and automation tool – iPaaS.
Curious about how other companies are using automation and integration to supercharge their service delivery and relieve the pressure on their IT help desks? Check out our latest eBook: Automate IT – A Playbook for Supercharged ITSM and read stories from businesses and organizations across industries.
