Moves, adds, changes and deletes; joiners, leavers and movers.
Ask every IT department and they’ll tell you the same thing – it’s those simple tasks that often eat the most resource.
For an SME, the impact can be significant.
Apply scale and complexity, and those apparently-benign back-office processes can start to seriously undermine important stuff like service and innovation.
After all, in today’s digital world, there aren’t many aspects of any organisation’s day-to-day operations that don’t rely in some form on an IT department’s capacity to cover all the bases.
For Managed Service Providers and Value Added Resellers, providing customers with the means to boost that capacity whilst simultaneously reducing costs can make for a compelling offer.
Cue: hyper-automation.
“Zero-touch processes, self-service, automation – these are the new enabling concepts that can have disproportionately-positive effects on productivity and efficiency,” says Tim Jalland, Solution Manager at global digital workplace management software provider VOSS, which is leading the way in next-era planning and execution.
“Technological advancements have meant IT service centre workloads have grown exponentially over the last few years. Processes can be complex, difficult and hugely demanding.
“The trick is to turn all of that heavy lifting into light work.”
To pull it off, organisations need a single control panel sat across all of the many complex and inter-dependent applications which make up an increasingly-standard IT infrastructure.
“Achieve that, and you can potentially turn a 12-step manual process into a four or five step one, often saving up to 10 minutes each time,” says Jalland.
“Applied in a large organisation with many hundreds of employees, and those kind of efficiencies can be extremely significant.”
For Managed Service Providers in particular, continually-increasing volumes of multi-step, manually-keyed processes can have devastating effects on the value of a fixed contract.
More work for the same return is an unsustainable model.
Simultaneously serving multiple end user customers, MSPs can experience serious issues around tickets being raised in multiple ways, complicated and time-consuming access to multiple vendor portals, and potentially high-risk security implications.
Hyper-automation delivered via a single interface – like the VOSS digital workplace management portal – leverages a relatively-new and increasing demand for zero-touch and self-service IT management.
Importantly, it also standardises data management and reduces human error.
“The demand is fuelled by a general increased confidence in technology across all levels of society,” says Jalland.
“Technological advancements and an absolute need to embrace them due to the pandemic has meant that people are now more at ease with tech.
“They have become used to downloading and installing and configuring their own phones, devices and software at home. They have seen what is digitally possible and they expect that level of light-touch control in the workplace too.
“But many back-office changes are really quite difficult, such as some Microsoft Teams configurations, and can only be performed by an IT professional.
“For many of those professionals, hyper-automation is a total game-changer”
For MSPs and resellers, that means opportunity is everywhere.
Whether it’s a conversation starter with a new prospect or an existing customer upsell, the ability to demonstrate how instant efficiencies can be delivered at the same time as improved service levels and better user experiences is about as good as it gets.
The VOSS solution is customisable to address organisations’ specific needs and is configured to adapt neatly into organisations’ ways of working, existing processes and IT application sites.
It delivers functionality that ranges from providing a simple repository of names, numbers and user settings, to enabling complex, inter-dependent data changes across multiple departments of a business; from HR to IT, and everywhere in between.
It can also double as an easy-access reporting tool; providing a simple, single view of organisations’ IT infrastructure, users and configurations.
“It’s an easy conversation for a reseller to have with their customer as there is no real trade off,” says Jalland.
“From the reseller’s perspective, it’s easy too.
“We offer lots of flexibility and lots of different packages that can customise and optimise processes based on individual need.
“We also provide deployment support packages to ensure everything works smoothly.
“As digitisation continues to transform the way the world works, the volume and complexity of service requests will just keep rising.
“Our advice to resellers is not to wait until someone else capitalises on that.”
- To learn more about how VOSS can help you and your customers grow, click here.
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