Automation in ITSM solutions

Automation is a key component of effective service management. Your ITSM solution should include facilities for automating key workflows across your environment, giving your teams time back in their day to tackle more important tasks. 

This automation shouldn’t be limited to only automating the workflows the tool itself imposes on your teams; flexible platforms will allow your team to be creative in their use of automation and provide a substrate for expanding automation across the entire ecosystem.

Many ITSM solutions will include the ability to automate basic IT service requests, change management, security approvals, infrastructure provisioning and other tasks. How the platform provides these features can mean the difference between an OK solution and one that is indispensable to your business.

Automation has several benefits, not limited to time savings, though that is often the primary goal for organizations looking to implement an automation solution. 
 
• Time savings
Automation can be magic; it creates time where there was none! Instead of your team repeatedly working through processes manually, your platform performs well understood tasks on your behalf, leaving more time for team members to tackle trickier problems, planning and other higher-value tasks. Additionally, composable automation can be plugged into event-driven workflows, launching work without any human interactions.
 
Time is saved on workflows that need human approvals as well. Automated systems can notify users whose approvals are required when the processes are ready, smoothing the approval process by presenting approvers with a one-click approval for simple jobs or a more detailed summary for more complex requests. Human-in-the-loop processes benefit when the automation platform takes care of managing and monitoring approvals, so human teams don’t have to.

• Repeatability
When tasks are delegated to automation, the risk of mistakes disappears. No more worrying that someone will miss a step or forget something. When the automation has been written and stored in the platform, it will run as expected each time. This is particularly valuable for processes with many steps, which can be confusing for busy team members to execute.

• Knowledge Preservation
Automation allows your experts to preserve their knowledge in a place where it can be accessed by everyone. Processes are explicitly documented, and as long as the automation is maintained, expertise is available to everyone.  

• Auditability
A final major benefit of automation is the availability of data around all the jobs an automation platform runs on the team’s behalf. This data may include by default basic information about each job such as who requested it and when, but also more sophisticated metrics such as how long the process took to complete or an estimate of overall time savings based on how many times a particular workflow is deployed, data that is more difficult to collect from manual processes.

Automation platforms promise many things. The various capabilities may vary depending on the use cases you are hoping to automate, but several beneficial features will stand out in your automation success.

• Composability
Many of the automation components your team will rely on will be used repeatedly – logging into systems, running commands, accessing resources in your environment. Give your automation authors a toolset that allows them to choose the common components they need while customizing their processes for individual projects. Composability also means that different experts can contribute to different parts of your solution, based on their areas of expertise, so that everyone benefits from best practices.
 
Composability can also include human-in-the-loop automation steps. Some of your processes may require explicit approvals, and automation should provide the ability to notify approvers and capture that approval.

• Flexible secrets management.
An underrated feature of many automation platforms is how they interact with centralized secrets management tools. Your teams likely already have a comprehensive solution for secrets management; an automation platform should consume secrets from a centralized location, not require local copies of secrets.

• Delegation
All of these features combined will help facilitate what everyone really wants from ITSM automation – self-service! Service consumers don’t want to be waiting for tickets in a queue to be actioned. Technical teams don’t want to be bound by an endless stream of boring, repetitive tasks from the queue. With good guard rails, auditing and secrets management, any member of the team should be able to get work accomplished with minimal wait time.

While all of these benefits sound amazing in theory, putting automation into practice can be challenging. Automation is an investment and will require ongoing resources to maintain, so automation projects should be considered as ongoing rather than a single implementation. 
 
A few things to keep in mind when planning an automation project and choosing tools:
 
• Providing access
Licensing concerns often emerge when deploying tools that will be widely used across an organization. Limiting access to automation tools can create an informal layer of requests, as teams ask folks with access to run jobs for them. Your team will see the most benefit when employees who need to get work done that can be accomplished with automation are all granted access to the automation tools. 

• Maintaining for the long term
Automated components will require maintenance and updating as your environment changes. Many teams stumble, thinking that automation can be deployed once and then allowed to run forever. Unfortunately, technical environments rarely stay locked for long. Security changes, feature updates and performance upgrades will change the targets of automation tools, and the tools will need to be updated accordingly. 
 
Any automation provided by the tooling has to work correctly for the people who are responsible for the intended outcomes. Long-term success with automation platforms is a worthy goal for teams to have, but resources will be required to keep it successful. 

Automation solutions for ITSM should provide more than just a facility for running scripts and commands around your tech environment. They are powerful tools that create more time for important high-level tasks, capture expertise and help maintain a trusted environment. The tool you choose should be evaluated as you would an additional team member – for flexibility, trustworthiness, and the ability to learn.

For more insights and expert guidance, explore ITIL-aligned ITSM tools and PeopleCert ITIL certifications.