As your organization grows, manual processes that were once convenient become increasingly inconvenient. They’re now cumbersome, slow, plainly inefficient and hinder opportunities for innovation. 

This is worsened by the rapid onset of digital transformation. Some organizations report that this transformation was accelerated by three to five years since 2020 by the pandemic. 

In the era of Everywhere Work, where the average employee uses 2.6 devices to complete tasks and 73% of IT and security professionals report increased workloads due to remote work, IT service management automation makes life more manageable for your organization. 

Some examples of ITSM automation include: 

  • Automating ticket assignment based on user roles. 
  • Automating service requests and approvals. 
  • Automating alerts and notifications. 
  • Automating workflows and processes. 
  • Automating reporting and analytics. 
  • Automating policy and procedure enforcement. 
  • Automating resource allocation and management. 

Why ITSM automation matters 

Reducing workloads for employees is more important than ever. Our expanding, complex digital landscape and hesitation on the part of some C-suites and corporate boards to make major technology investments have left many IT professionals overwhelmed. 

Leadership’s reluctance may be understandable. According to an EY study, 30–50% of first-time automation projects fail — making some organizations leery of new attempts. But as we’ll see, this hesitancy has profound negative effects on IT personnel who are essential to modern growth and competitiveness. 

Ivanti’s 2023 Everywhere Workplace Report surveyed 8,400 office workers, IT and security professionals and C-level executives across the globe and uncovered concerning trends, particularly among IT teams. 

Of the IT workers surveyed: 

  • 28% lacked motivation. 
  • 35% said burnout from their workloads was a reason they'd consider quitting their current job. 
  • 21% would consider quitting due to burnout from long hours and unreasonable demands. 

These low levels of employee engagement are apparent across multiple departments as well – one in three office workers under the age of 40 admit to “quiet quitting,” and more than one in four say they might leave their job in the next six months. 

Yet, Ivanti research found that just 8% of organizations were prioritizing automation of repetitive tasks in 2023, despite how this would alleviate the workload pressures faced by IT teams. 

Clearly, organizations must adjust to keep workloads under control, improve employee morale and create flexible working arrangements, or they risk losing employees to competitors who can promise better DEX.

Benefits of service management automation 

Service management automation offers plenty of benefits, including: 

1. Quicker response times 

Slow response times are one of the most common complaints regarding helpdesks. ITSM automation of the service management process helps determine the priority of the incident, assign it to the correct worker and can send updates to the user. These improvements will speed up your response times and make sure IT workers aren't bombarded with helpdesk tickets. 

2. Better visibility 

 Only 47% of IT professionals say they have complete visibility into every device that attempts to access their networks. In fact, 32% reported they still use spreadsheets to track their devices. This expanding endpoint environment isn't only incredibly challenging for IT professionals to maintain, but it also puts your organization at risk. 

IT service management automation can provide full visibility into your IT estate. Your service desk will always have access to comprehensive information on all your IT assets, allowing them to quickly identify issues and fix them without laboring through multiple spreadsheets. 

3. More room for strategic initiatives 

Eliminating these time-consuming and obsolete work processes with ITSM automation means your IT teams won’t be bogged down in manual processes. Instead, they’ll have more time to invest in strategic initiatives that'll elevate IT as a strategic partner in your organization. 

4 ways ITSM automation streamlines work to reduce IT burnout 

Utilizing ITSM automation enables you to streamline and simplify various processes associated with IT service management. Beyond making these processes more rapid and effective, it also reduces the amount of time needed to perform previously manual tasks, resulting in reduced workloads and a lower chance of burnout for your IT team. 

1. Incident management

Addressing issues in real time is a constant concern for IT teams. To ensure high-quality DEX, even as hybrid and remote work models add complexity to their jobs, IT teams must respond faster and resolve incidents in fewer interactions. 

An automated self-healing solution can proactively detect, categorize and resolve device performance issues. This boosts IT staff efficiency and allows them to spend less time on manual tasks. For example, South Star Bank used automated, self-healing technology to resolve up to 80% of endpoint issues before users even reported them. 

2. Problem management 

Problem management — discovering and remediating the underlying causes of IT issues — is essential to stemming incidents. However, a 2023 study by ITSM.tools found only 38% of organizations had implemented problem management processes, due to a lack of understanding of how important they are and the difficulty of executing them manually. 

Automating problem management processes — such as root cause analysis of device failures or risk management — using an ITSM solution allows Problem Managers to quickly detect and isolate similar recurring incidents, link incidents with known problems, organize problem management metrics, assign problem ownership and quickly escalate problems to Request for Change (RFC) status. 

3. Configuration management 

Configuration management across an entire organization is extremely hard to pull off using manual means, especially for a business of any notable size. But service management automation can make it far more achievable. 

By automatically discovering all assets and devices across the network, a service management automation solution allows change managers to identify every CI (configuration item) that will be impacted by a proposed change, understand what the impacts of the changes will be and quickly uncover the root causes of incidents for faster resolution. ITSM automation also enables IT teams to see which known problems affect CIs and devise quicker, more efficient workarounds or fixes. 

4. Change Management 

As touched on in the previous section on configuration management, automated asset discovery helps ensure the changes IT implements are more effective and successful. This is accomplished by identifying potential risks up front. 

For example, an automated asset discovery process can provide readily available insights so a Change Advisory Board (CAB) can review and easily answer key questions about matters like license allocation and the need for hardware or software updates. Importantly, having more complete asset information can accelerate emergency change requests where resolution time is crucial. 

Want more on the benefits of automating ITSM? 

If you'd like to learn more about the benefits of modernizing your ITSM approach, dive into our ITSM+ Toolkit. 

And to explore more insights into the state of modern work environments, download the 2023 Everywhere Work Report.