Agile practices and continuous delivery rely on automation. IT automation in business has helped transform the digital landscape and is turning businesses into Modern Software Factories that the current era needs.
To fully utilize innovations like Artificial Intelligence you must first move away from manual processes.
Done well, automation can increase employee satisfaction by freeing them from tedious tasks, and can also improve customer experience significantly.
Automation points out the hidden problems in your processes that are usually handled by staff working around the process. Automated systems are self-service systems and save up a lot of time.
Automation is a natural fit for: help desks, service inquiries, training, hiring, onboarding, various operations, IT procurement, cyber-security, project administration, and reporting.
Here is a look at seven areas that need automation:
1. Customer service
Most tickets are highly repetitive and easy to resolve, processes that resolve these common tickets are prime candidates for automation.
Chatbots and virtual agents are ideal for easy, repetitive queries and for customers who prefer self-service. Microsoft has been using its AI Solution for Customer Service for enterprise support in call centers and the number of customers who were able to solve their own problem doubled.
2. HR and recruiting
Automating administrative tasks to free up recruiter’s time is another crucial area that can be explored.
Automation will help HR handle a huge volume of applications by qualifying the candidates that are suitable for the job.
This way organizations enable the recruiters to become more strategic and focus on meeting the modern candidate’s needs and expectations and also build meaningful relationships with those candidates.
Also, low-value HR tasks like calculating leave benefits or value of accrued vacation time when employees leave can be automated.
3. Payments
Inefficient travel and expense systems waste a lot of employee time and also create unnecessary conflicts in certain cases.
Connecting to bank/credit card accounts to automatically categorize expenses, is the approach towards automation that can prove to be very useful in this case.
4. IT operations
The IT industry has to be responsive, and in achieving that goal, automation is key. A recent survey shows that IT teams spend more than half their time on maintenance and fixing problems hence leaving them with reduced time to actually innovate new products and services.
IT professionals believe that almost one-fifth of their daily tasks could be completely automated by intelligent automation and AI.
5. Security automation
Automation can also improve security and compliance using the automatic monitoring of suspicious behavior. Setting up such a system can lock devices that show unusual behavior hence blocking attackers.
Security and compliance are generally managed by a completely separate department in IT firms, and this entire process can be automated – to save time and efforts.
6. Testing
Automation is crucial to development, especially in creating builds for continuous deployment. The main reason is that it’s just faster! Removing human involvement as much as possible results in a faster processor and lets you accelerate app development.
It’s also much more repeatable, and people make mistakes but automation doesn’t!
Test automation starts with automating the creation of test environments. Automating the testing process itself is very difficult, but also critical for increasing development speed and reliability. Achieving automated testing, however, can reduce weeks or months of testing time to a few minutes.
