Remote access, teleworking, staff turnover, multi-site collaboration... The pandemic has turned the organisation of many companies upside down. Their information systems are becoming increasingly heterogeneous and therefore complex to manage. To increase efficiency and reduce errors, IT teams are relying on IT automation. This solution has many advantages, but it is not suitable for fragmented environments.

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IT management is a headache! According to a study conducted by Dynatrace, a software company specialising in application performance management, 76% of CIOs believe that complexity makes it impossible to manage their digital portfolios effectively.

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As their business grows, CIOs are faced with managing numerous digital tools and technologies that are incompatible. Fragmented and siloed environments make IT administration a nightmare! 

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ITSM: a better employee experience

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The provisioning of IT resources is essential. Facilitating employee access to servers, programs and cloud computing processes has become critical. The management of these resources can be optimised through automation.

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And this is no longer just an objective for IT departments. HR departments also want to optimise the employee experience by facilitating access to information and resources. In England, Tesco has realised that employees are as important as the customers themselves. The supermarket giant realised that it needed a more efficient way to manage the internal demands of its 460,000 employees spread across 9 countries. By implementing an ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) solution , approximately 79% of the tickets were resolved at once. 

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While this IT service management tool can significantly reduce the number of tickets and increase the speed of their resolution, it is not yet widely used to optimise desktop management from a hardware and software point of view, but also in relation to remote access and employee authentication.

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Hence the need to improve the management of its IT assets in order to develop, maintain and optimise all its IT resources. A precise inventory allows us to determine whether or not the company is penalised by a heterogeneous IT infrastructure. A homogeneous fleet allows the company to maximise its operation, but also to reduce management costs (including the obsolescence of smartphones and tablets) and maintenance costs thanks to the automation of processes.

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Favouring profile-based configurations

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This IT industrialisation becomes essential as soon as the activity becomes too important and makes IT management time-consuming. Automation has many benefits. When you automate IT processes, you reduce the risk of human error. As a result, there are fewer errors and an error-free company is more efficient and better able to serve its customers. By reducing the risk of human error, the IT team can focus on what they do best, not on solving tickets.

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Automation allows you to optimize configurations specific to each business profile. Not all workstations are alike. IT needs to identify them by discussing them with employee managers. These discussions need to take place on a regular basis, as the increasing integration of SaaS (Software-as-a-service) solutions, collaborative tools facilitating the sharing of more or less sensitive files, and remote access makes IT configuration more complex.

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By automating it, you can ensure that environments are configured correctly, reduce installation (or upgrade) errors and ultimately increase overall productivity. Automation also helps organisations increase their level of security by proactively focusing on preventing vulnerabilities and threats.

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Automation can lead to chaos!

But is IT automation suitable for all situations? Is it the norm for all companies? Definitely not. A start-up with less than 70 employees does not need an IT manager. Its IT administration can be handled by an IT service provider.

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It must be ensured that automation does not involve an IT process that no longer makes sense. Instead of being automated, it should simply be deleted.

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In conclusion, IT automation is ideal for gaining efficiency and agility. Its implementation is also an effective trigger to review existing processes. While repeatable processes justify automation, it is important to ensure that they are executed in the right way. Automating the wrong processes proliferates chaos!