Access IT Automation Blog

Lately, there is a lot of talk about XLAs! No, not the Excel add-in but rather Experience Level Agreements between a service provider and a customer with the goal of providing the best employee experience with said provider’s services.

Traditionally, software vendors had service-level agreements, or SLAs, which described expected minimum service levels that the service provider guaranteed (e.g., minimum uptimes or time to respond/repair issues) for the price someone would pay. Until now, SLAs were seen as the crucial measurement for a successful relationship between a software vendor and an enterprise IT department.

By now, most enterprises are using some form of IT Automation to create repeatable processes that minimize or avoid human interaction with IT systems with the goal of realizing potential cost reductions, process improvements, and efficiency gains.

However, almost always, IT automation is done in bits and pieces — without a central repository or the ability to manage them. As a result, enterprises often have dozens of unused or underutilized agents which, of course, then hinders the organization in achieving their automation goals.

If your organization is running Office 2010 and has LOB critical macros or apps, you have a hard deadline of October 13, 2020 to migrate, or you risk continuing to use those apps and macros while running a vulnerable, unsupported version of Office.

Unlike for Windows 7, which goes End-of-Life 9 months earlier on January 14, 2020, Office 2010 will not have extended support, paid or otherwise. This means no security or critical updates, no phone or chat support, it will not be available to download from the Microsoft site, and most online help content will be retired as well. So even if your enterprise puts off migrating to keep certain macros working, you could face issues that affect the entire Office Suite and beyond.

According to a Zendesk study, organizations receive an average of 492 tickets per month — 69% of which could be resolved with a single touch. On average, these tickets cost $15.56 per ticket and take more than 24 hours to first respond. Based on my experience, it could take an additional 2-3 days to get the ticket resolved after the initial response has been sent.

Considering that the majority of tickets could be resolved within minutes rather than a full day, there is much room for improvement. Without improvement, there are drastic consequences for your organizations: 22 minutes of lost productivity per day per employee! And lost productivity means lost revenue.

Between maintaining the current IT environment and driving innovation, IT departments have had to figure out how to manage their increasingly complex environments with fewer resources and less budget and time.

Automating otherwise time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks can not only enable you to chip away at your ever-growing workload faster, but can increase your ability to adapt to changes in your environment — two crucial success factors in today's evergreen IT landscapes.

But where do you start? Here are six simple, yet highly effective IT automation opportunities that you might not have explored yet, but are easily accomplished:

In a world of Digital Transformation where "King Customer" rules, we can all agree that the experience a user has with a product is instrumental. In other words, today, success is about providing the best possible End User Experience (EUX).

End user experience isn't limited to an organization's customers. It also needs to include its employees and other stakeholders. Internal departments such as HR, finance, marketing, and IT need to learn to tune into and better anticipate the needs of employees as well — especially the IT department!

There's no denying it: If you are a Microsoft shop, it is very likely that your organization is going to migrate to Office 365 sooner rather than later. The SaaS version of the Office Suite has so much more to offer than the on-premise version, i.e., newer features, enhanced security, stability fixes, etc.

Whether your enterprise is updating because your on-premise version (Office 2010) goes end-of-life next year in October, or you want to take advantage of features that your version (Office 2016 & 2019) doesn't have, you can run into roadblocks that will bring your migration to a halt.

Last year was a record year for cybersecurity breaches, malware attacks, and data leaks — and if the first few months are any indication, this year will bring on a new slew of record-breaking incidents as well.

But it isn't only the record-breaking headlines you should worry about. While massive data breaches, like last year's Target and Equifax incidents, get the most media attention, it is easy to assume that smaller businesses or organizations that haven't been targeted yet won't be under attack soon.

When considering endpoint management automation, it is hard to know what you are getting into. There are various solutions that all have a slightly different angle and focus. Oftentimes, it is only afterwards that you realize you should have paid more attention to a specific feature that turns out to be crucial or made a certain integration a must-have requirement in the Request-for-Proposal process. 

But one thing is for sure: you will want to make sure that you pick an IT automation solution that is future-proof, scalable and agile enough. In the past few years, I found that it really comes down to four main considerations:

• Your new solution needs to integrate with your existing infrastructure to provide an end-to-end solution. 
• It needs to be extremely flexible and customizable to fit your needs — today and in the future — while centralizing fixes in an ever-growing repository. 
• IT automation should also allow smart targeting by a large range of filters to enable you to apply automation to a few, to most, or to all of your devices. 
• Lastly, it should be easy to use for your administrative staff as well as your end users to encourage adoption and wide-spread usage. 

Let's have a closer look at each of those points below.

One of the biggest objections that IT professionals and executives face when trying to sell Endpoint Management Automation is: "WHY do we need it?" While the question from an executive management point of view is understandable, it can be frustrating as well. Deep down you are convinced of the benefits this will bring, but how can you convince them?

The good news is that this objection is easily answered by cold, hard numbers that can prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that implementing endpoint management automation isn't only a good idea, but will show tangible business results in terms of hard and soft saves. 

While every situation is unique, there are some crucial IT help desk key performance indicators that allow you to create a waterproof business case quickly and easily.