Digital Growth Strategies: Key Drivers for IT Service Automation and Operational Excellence

To meet the accelerating demands of internal and external customers, digital services must be delivered through an efficient production line. For most IT executives, this is easier said than done.

Challenges often arise from manual delivery processes, customization requests, IT complexity, operational costs, and an overall changing hybrid IT landscape that can directly impact business performance and customer satisfaction.

Standardization and Service Automation

To keep pace with digital transformation, IoT, commoditization, and changing consumer expectations, rapid time to market is imperative.

As customers have come to expect flawless customer service, ultra-fast delivery times, and a one-stop shopping experience, organizations must accelerate production processes by automating workflows and offering highly customizable products and services.

This can be achieved with a standardized product catalog. By standardizing the single components of a service, you can easily determine the configuration options you want to provide for each category. This makes it possible to reuse products efficiently and provide services in a flexible manner and with consistently high quality, while also keeping costs under control. The result is an increase in the flexibility and speed with which IT can provide essential business services.

To help organizations meet these strategic initiatives, FNT provides an engine for IT service automation. This central service management database allows organizations to manage their standardized products, descriptions, service options and contracts coherently. On one hand, interfaces to a shop portal offer/transmit all necessary information to provide a one-stop-shopping experience for the customer. On the other hand, more detailed information about provisioning processes and parts list can be provided to infrastructure delivery teams as well as orchestration tools. In this way, a dedicated database boosts the efficiency of your service management activities and streamlines standardized products and services.

Transforming IT Infrastructure

Before starting to optimize fragile and business-critical provisioning processes, organizations looking to drive operational excellence must first invest in their IT infrastructure. To maintain uninterrupted services and to rollout services more efficiently, a comprehensive IT management solution is essential and should be the first step before thinking of automation. You simply can’t measure and optimize (or automate) what you can’t manage. As trivial as it may seem, proper documentation, management, and planning can optimize the interplay between all areas of the IT infrastructure. For example:

Documentation – For deep visibility into IT infrastructure, systems should include a central data repository of up-to-date and accurate information about every physical asset and how they are all connected.

Management – To ensure all assets are functioning optimally and to avoid service interruptions, systems should detect problems in real-time and have processes in place to resolve potential issues.

Planning – To enable modifications to any service, systems should be flexible to incorporate new assets and processes as needed.

Ultimately, choosing the right solution to manage IT infrastructure makes all the difference. To deliver best-in-class technology services, organizations need a best-in-class IT management system that increases uptime even as capacity demands grow.

Ideally, all relationships between assets and CIs on the physical, logical, and virtual levels as part of a fully integrated system can be modeled in accordance with the task at hand. In addition to organizing IT infrastructure more effectively, the system of choice should support planning scenarios based on accurate, real-time information.

To summarize, meeting customer demands regarding speed and configurability of business services can be achieved through service automation. However, there is a lot more to automation than just implementing additional automation tools. You have to clean up your product portfolio, increase standardization and, last but not least, create a seamless interplay between physical IT infrastructure and deliverable IT services. Our advice: Don’t try to minimize the holistic approach and leave some essential steps out – other companies  learned this the hard way. In IT, everything is connected somehow.

Interested in learning more how FNT can help you to accelerate service automation? Contact us today!