Your IT department wants to innovate and deliver a highly efficient service to end users. However, the reality is that, like many IT departments, most of your team’s working hours are dedicated to time-consuming and repetitive maintenance tasks. As recent research shows, the average IT department spends 55% of its budget simply maintaining business operations.
But what if you could automate IT processes? If many of those repetitive tasks could be effectively outsourced to digital workflow solutions, your IT team would have more time to spend on improving services and supporting your company.
Many of our customers use Nintex to support IT process automation. Let’s find out why, then look at some of the most common workflow templates used by IT departments.
Why automate IT processes?
IT departments have a huge range of tasks that they must complete on a daily basis. From managing customer service requests to cyber security checks and software maintenance, these vital operations keep businesses running.
The problem is that these processes take up a lot of time. And sometimes they can be fairly monotonous. For example, onboarding temporary staff with new passwords, email addresses, and accounts could easily take up 30 minutes of your IT helpdesk’s time—yet it provides little added value to the business.
However, if you were to automate IT processes, many of your team’s tasks would happen with minimal human input. That would mean:
- IT support staff could dedicate more time to complex problems
- You could potentially reassign budget to new technologies or invest in innovation
- Team morale is improved when staff have more engaging work to do
5 common IT process automation templates
Nintex’s Solution Accelerator Gallery lets you find and download readymade workflow templates. There are literally hundreds of workflows you can download to use and modify at your organization.
Let’s look at some of the most popular solutions to automate IT processes from the Solution Accelerator Gallery:
- Change requests
Our selection of change and release management templates helps manage system changes from the initial change request through to evaluation and implementation. Automating change requests means the request form is viewed by the right people, assessed, and responded to in a reasonable time frame.
Example: At an architecture firm, a designer wants to request access to cloud storage where he can upload large files. By using a change request form, his request is routed to the correct people. Every step of the process is automated—from assessing different storage options, to costs, to sign off, and approval.
- Project planning
Planning out IT projects is a time-consuming and complex task. From assigning project managers to defining the steps involved in completing the process, a project planning workflow can standardize IT project management at your organization.
Example: If you have decided to initiate a new project to upgrade certain servers, you can use the project planning workflow to automate each step of the project. Your organization’s specific project management approach is mapped out and repeated each time you upgrade your technology. As a result, you know it will always be done the same way.
- IT help desk
One of the most popular forms of IT process automation focuses on helpdesk tasks. These workflow templates allow you to automatically route requests to the right person and save yourself lots of back and forth between the IT department and the customer.
Example: An employee is having trouble logging onto your company’s virtual private network. If you have automated IT processes, they simply need to fill in a form on your support website, select the kind of problem they’re having, and this will be automatically sent to the person who can fix the problem.
- Incident management
When an IT incident occurs, it is vital that you respond to the issue as soon as possible. IT process automation templates help by standardizing your approach each time a technology incident arises. That means problems get fixed fast, consistently, and everyone knows their responsibilities.
Example: Your company’s intranet has gone down, and you need to return it to working order as soon as possible. By kicking off an ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) incident management workflow, the right people receive alerts and know exactly what is required of them.
- Responding to managed services requests
Another popular solution to automate IT processes is a workflow that helps respond to managed service requests. Rather than relying on emails or phone calls to make these requests, automating the workflow means that the right people see the request and ensure it gets addressed as soon as possible.
Example: One of your employees would like to host an app in a third-party server. Before sending this request out to your managed services partner, your in-house IT department views the request and decides if it is appropriate. By routing the request through the IT department, it becomes much more efficient to either approve or deny the request.
Ready to automate IT processes?
There are so many IT department activities which are perfectly suited to IT process automation. So, why not get started today with a free template from the Nintex Solution Accelerator Gallery?
To learn more about how Nintex can help your organization automate IT processes, get in contact with the Nintex team today.
