Democratizing Service Automation
To truly digitize organizations, Enterprises need to adopt a different rhythm for service delivery and democratize automation.
In this article, we look at the challenges impeding Enterprises in democratizing service automation and see how DigitalXC can help address these successfully
The case for dedicated automation teams is losing relevance
Enterprise Service Delivery today is largely ticket-driven. The support team raises service needs as tickets through a ticketing system and resolves them. More than 80% of the workload of support teams is towards service delivery. Automation today plays a big role in simplifying service delivery for support personnel at the backend. A team with highly skilled members dedicated to automating processes works on a pipeline of automation needs. Such a division of labour between automation and support teams worked well so far in the pre-digital scenario. However, with the rapid digitization of service delivery, it is worth asking if this model is indeed scalable.
As services become digitized in Enterprises, they should no longer be raised as tickets. In the consumer world, no one wants to raise tickets to book a cab or a hotel. Enterprise Service Delivery is on the verge of a similar experience shift, where all that a user needs is ‘an app for every service’.
Any user can order any service from any device at any time and receive it instantly, making zero touch the norm.
Support teams will move from resolving tickets (Service Delivery) towards self-help, self-heal, and self-service. Automation will now focus on enabling zero-touch for end users (and not limited to support personnel at the backend). Everyone in the support team is working in service design and automation and looks to eliminate tickets. This calls for a completely different rhythm in operations. The split between a dedicated support and automation team is no longer relevant. This will be an important organizational shift for a digitized delivery.
Conversely, for Service Delivery to be truly digitized, we need to democratize automation and make it easy for every member in the team to automate.
The big challenge in traditional delivery is Democratizing automation
That is a big leap from the way traditional Enterprises operate. Here are the big impediments to scaling and democratizing automation in Enterprises today.
- Automation requires skills and is strictly bound to ‘qualified’ resources.
- Speed of automation is slow because of the dependence on the dedicated automation team, their bandwidth, and priorities.
- Automation landscape is siloed and limited to niches. There are multiple tools and platforms within an Organizational ecosystem. The focus is on automation within these niches.
- Reusability is minimal both within and across an enterprise. What is needed by one division within an Enterprise is also needed by other divisions within the same Enterprise. However, Automation today is more of a ‘patch’ on the current way of doing things.
Enterprises are looking for ways to scale automation.
How does DigitalXC help in Democratizing automation?
DigitalXC addresses this need for Enterprises to accelerate digital and democratize automation through the following levers
Componentization and Lego Block Model approach: DigitalXC breaks services into components and enables a Lego block model for assembling complex services. This rapidly improves reusability within an Enterprise. A complex service like user onboarding is a combination of multiple components such as user access, id-creation, software installs, etc. By taking a componentization approach, DigitalXC simplifies service design and automation and ensures reusability.
App-store model of subscription: DigitalXC provides an app-store model or a marketplace for subscribing to pre-built automated services. Every service is highly productized and standardized with well-defined inputs/outputs and highly reusable. New services are designed and pushed through the app store. Enterprises can even publish their services through a private app store.
Unified user interface: Rather than the user trying to access multiple tools and platforms for automation, DigitalXC’s unified user interface ensures services can be easily accessed/designed from one common interface. This simplifies automation and service creation.
Zero code drag-n-drop UI: DigitalXC’ s Service Designer provides a zero code interface where services can be easily dragged and dropped like Lego blocks to form complex automations. DigitalXC reduces the skill threshold needed by teams for complex automation.
Service Assembly model: DigitalXC elevates organizations from a traditional build/implement approach to a service assembly model through our combination of Lego-block model, app store, and service designer. This helps to improve the speed of automation significantly. Moreover, nearly 30% of Service requests can be automated in 1-2 months or less.
Conclusion
In summary, DigitalXC successfully achieves the goal of democratization through a combination of the above-mentioned engineering innovations. Furthermore, DigitalXC helps elevate the maturity of the organization from a ticket-centric to a catalog-centric delivery with a consumer-grade experience. End-users get self-service with fully automated zero-touch delivery.