We are almost outgrowing the fourth industrial revolution and integrating cutting-edge technology and intelligent systems that integrate with humans. IT process automation (ITPA) helps you get repetitive and tedious manual processes off your employee’s hands. This allows the team members to be more productive, minimize human error, enhance collaboration and free up their time for more cognitive tasks.
What is IT Process Automation?
IT process automation (ITPA), also referred to as infrastructure automation, refers to using software to create repetitive processes and instructions that either replace or reduce human interventions with IT systems. Automation is crucial to digital transformation and IT optimization and relies a lot on AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine learning.
ITPA can be used to streamline your IT operations in various situations, and its purpose is to eliminate the repetitive tasks and business processes and replace them with automated solutions. IT process automation is ideal for multiple jobs and helps businesses with a broad range of processes that cause bottlenecks. This includes areas of your business with:
- A high transaction volume
- A limited interaction level with employees
- Complicated manual tasks and complex processes that need to be simplified
- Increased data entry task volumes prone to many errors
Common ITPA Use cases
IT process automation solutions support the IT team to improve its efficiency. It reduces tedious IT tasks such as testing, deploying, and system maintenance checks.
1. Improve Service Request Workflow
IT Process automation tools can start with your service requests and help desk. You can connect this workflow to your service channels and multiple systems.
The automation functionality can collate your help desk requests and other channels such as email requests or client-side self-service support portals. It can filter duplicated requests, answer FAQs, and input requests into the ticketing system.
2. Simplify Onboarding and Offboarding
Setting up and provisioning for new hires can take a lot of time and interrupts other projects. IT automation work to simplify and increase efficiency in onboarding and offboarding. For instance, when a new employee signs, the ITPA can trigger an email from existing templates, asking them about their desk setup preference. Their responses trigger the purchase of new desk supplies or disburse them from the office inventory.
3. Routine Checks
You can automate system cleanups, updates, and backups to happen on a scheduled and regular basis. ITPA can run and monitor automatic systems reports on efficiency, bandwidth, and usage.
4. Activity Triggers
Activity triggers allow a process to have one or more triggers, such as inbound API schedules or calls, user interactions where the process represents the response. Customizable alerts allow IT teams to enhance SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and workflow automation.
Types of Process Automation
There are four categories of Process automation
- IT Process Automation (ITPA)
- Business Process Automation (BPA)
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
- Digital Process Automation (DPA)
These automation solutions overlap in their capabilities but do not share one origin, so they are different.
Difference between ITPA and RPA
Not to be confused with ITPA, RPA, or Robotic Process automation is slightly different. With RPA, you get automation software robots/bots that learn and mimic humans and execute business processes. RPAs can interact with any system or app like humans but are faster, 100% reliable, and accurate and work nonstop.
ITPA works behind the scenes while RPAs interact with the user. RPA bots are easy to use, and they are as easy as using drag and drop for files. RPA is a significant part of Intelligent Automation. The connection of RPA software to AI technology is what makes it intelligent.
Process Orchestration and Digital Transformation
There is a need for businesses to integrate novel tools with existing systems and create new processes to use these technologies to stay on top of emerging trends. This needs process orchestration, a new field that is home to various technologies used for different use cases.
Conclusion
IT automation is a process that benefits all stakeholders, from the business owners, employees, and customers. ITPA is made up of software solutions based on science-based technologies such as healthcare, AI, DevOps, IoT, ML, etc.
In another decade, automation will have advanced to a different level, and we’ll have probably entered into the fifth industrial revolution if we haven’t already.