For organizations to succeed in getting started with automation efforts, experts recommend they focus on the “pain points” of the process, and use those successes to build momentum for automation.
During MeriTalk’s “Modernizing IT Service: Public Sector IT Leaders Leverage Automation to Alleviate Pressure” webinar on Feb. 28, IT experts explained why it’s best to start with something that is “universally painful” for the organization.
“When somebody starts an automation process or is interested in automation, pick something that’s universally painful: pension, onboarding, and offboarding. High amount of risk, lots of toil, and very painful, right? Those types of things, when you fix them with automation, tend to create more momentum for automation,” explained Andrew Graf, chief product officer at TeamDynamix.
“It’s easy to get overwhelmed thinking about automation,” he added. “But, when we see clients anchor on one painful thing that they can fix, where anyone who has to touch that process says, ‘Wow, that was way better.’ It opens your mind to more automation.”
Mark Hayes, the chief deputy director of IT for Pima County, Ariz., said when he selected a platform for IT service management, TeamDynamix stood out as the clear winner. He explained it also helped him to embrace automation and remove the toil.
“TeamDynamix was easily the winner in that process,” Hayes said. “It did help us hone in on where does it hurt the most? What are the things that if we could solve these five things, we’d be 80 percent of the way there?”
Along with aiding automation efforts, he explained that Pima County also gets a vast amount of data out of its services from TeamDynamix, such as how many tickets it’s handling, what type, how long they take, and who the high performers are in solving the issues.
For those city and state newbies who are looking to embark on similar initiatives for transforming services through automation, Hayes echoed Graf in saying that they should focus on the pain points.
“Look at your data and understand where your pain is. Because, if you’re short on staff, you need to find ways to do more with less stuff. So, what are the things that are keeping you from being able to do that? Focus on those, pick out one or two small ones, and build off of that,” Hayes said. “And keep your data and publish your data.”
“It doesn’t have to be transformational right out of the box,” he added. “You can be transformational by small incremental improvements over an accelerated period of time. And that’s been our experience and that’s what I would recommend other people do as well.”
To listen to the entire conversation on-demand and learn more about how to successfully leverage automation, check out the full webinar here.
