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August 1, 2022

5 minutes read

Automate IT – Saving Time and Supercharging ITSM with Automation

Supercharge ITSM with automation digital transformation and enterprise integration

By

Andrew Graf

As organizations look to find new, inventive ways to keep their teams happy and productive many in IT are upgrading their IT service management (ITSM) software – opting to move to codeless ITSM tools that offer flexibility for a lower total cost of ownership and easy-to-configure automation.

This is the case in Pima County, AZ. Aside from performance issues with their old ITSM platform, Mark Hayes, information technology leader at Pima County, said the county is looking at ways to combat resource drain and employee burnout with their new ITSM tool.

“Prior to TeamDynamix, we didn’t have the ability to automate things and build workflows to do things that eliminate toil and redundancy for our employees,” Hayes said.

And with many organizations struggling to maintain or hire new talent, especially in IT, this was critical for the county, “People feel so much more empowered and have so much more worth when they are doing things that are intellectually rigorous and challenging versus when they are just repeating the same mechanical actions over and over and over with very little thought,” Hayes said.

“Our ITSM is our entry point to our entire IT organization, and we want our employees to graduate out of this area into other roles within our organization – network technicians, client services, desktop technicians, developers and project managers,” he continued. “If all they’re doing is handling tickets and doing the same mundane, manual tasks over and over that’s not particularly great training. So investing in tools that allow our employees to engage in meaningful work is something that’s important to us as an overall IT organization.”

And Pima County isn’t the only organization trying to improve its employee experience through IT automation. Here are three other companies that have switched to TeamDynamix ITSM to automate manual tasks, enhance service delivery for customers and better employee workloads.

Nutrabolt Automates Ticket Assignment, Creation of Accounts, Tracking and More with Supercharged ITSM

“We had a help desk tool in place, but it was not purposefully built,” explains Mark Dittenber, Director of IT at Nutrabolt, a rapid-growth active health and wellness company based in Austin, Texas. “It was very generic, and there was no discipline in the use of it.”

Mark and his staff needed a highly flexible and customizable platform that could support new IT processes with automated workflows now, and into the future, as the company’s IT operations continued to mature.

“I liked the lightweight nature of TeamDynamix, as well as its ability to scale with our needs,” he observes.

Mark and his Team were able to implement TeamDynamix in a matter of weeks. They began with IT service management and have now expanded to include project management. All the configurations and automation are created without any technical resources on a no-code platform.

Within TeamDynamix, Mark and his Team established customized forms and automated workflows to create network accounts, assign rights and privileges to new teammates, submit and track service requests, request and approve IT changes, provision new devices, and more.

As they create new IT processes from the ground up, they’re also building out a knowledge base and a self-service portal. Having thoughtfully crafted processes in place — and the right enterprise service platform to support them — has already made a big impact in just a few months.

“We really notice this when we onboard new teammates, they are ramping much faster,” Mark said.

City of Avondale Leverages Portal, Automations Across Departments for Better, Faster Service

The TeamDynamix enterprise service management (ESM) platform plays a critical role in helping multiple branches of the City of Avondale, Arizona, government work better together. With a more efficient organization, the city can respond to citizens’ needs faster and more effectively, and by leveraging a single portal with automated request routing and workflows, the team can be more responsive and transparent with citizens.

“Before, people would have to call or email our help desk with their service requests,” says CIO Jeff Scheetz. “However, now with the portal, IT has been able to create workflows and automation, rather than managing the many email and ticket requests. The workflow ensures that the requests are handled efficiently and provides additional reporting capabilities. Before, it was hard to prioritize tasks without a full view of what was going on.” In just a little over a year, Scheetz and his staff transformed the delivery of IT service for the city using the TeamDynamix platform.

In addition, supercharged ITSM is helping to improve interdepartmental collaboration. For example, onboarding new employees is a multistep process that used to be quite cumbersome. Once new hires have completed all of the paperwork required by HR they need network privileges from IT, they have to be added to the city’s payroll system, and they need access to the building from Facilities.

This process used to involve a lot of paper shuffling, and it could take a while to complete. Now, the entire workflow can be initiated with a single service request form that is routed to the various departments automatically.

“We can make sure we’re addressing all of our needs expeditiously,” Scheetz said. Having an automated system that keeps everyone on the same page has made working remotely much easier for city employees during the pandemic. Although in-person operations have resumed, “if someone needs to work from home, we can easily accommodate that now,” he said.

TeamDynamix has enabled employees to streamline city operations and deliver better service to Avondale residents. The system’s versatility has added a tremendous amount of value to the city government. “Everybody has a limited staff,” Scheetz says of municipal organizations. “Having a system like TeamDynamix makes a huge difference.”

No-code ITSM Helps SLU Create an Agile Service Desk with Automation

In today’s rapidly evolving IT environment, agility is key. Being able to pivot quickly in response to conditions that are constantly changing allows IT service operations to address the needs of users more effectively. Saint Louis University (SLU), a private Jesuit research university with 14,000 students and 9,700 faculty and staff, has met this requirement with the help of TeamDynamix, an easy-to-use, no-code platform for managing the service desk, projects, assets and enterprise service for HR, Facilities and more.

Prior to TeamDynamix, SLU was using another tool for IT service management (ITSM), but the product was complex and hard to manage. Configuring the system required specialized coding ability, and the university struggled to hire and retain the staff needed to administer it. As a result, when IT service leaders wanted to make changes to the system, they would contract this work out to a third-party provider.

“It would take at least a month to get any changes completed,” says Cid Cardoz, director of end-user IT services for the university. “We were willing to go back to the drawing board to see if we could find a solution that worked better for our needs.” Through his research, Cardoz found TeamDynamix.

“What caught my eye was the no-code nature of the platform because that meant we could have anybody administer it without programming knowledge,” he observes. Now, Cardoz and his team don’t have to wait months to make changes, “we’re able to make changes on the fly and come up with solutions very quickly,” he says. “We have been making changes ever since we started using the system, adding new services to our service catalog—and the platform’s no-code nature makes this so much easier.” What used to take a month now only takes two or three days.”

Another aspect of TeamDynamix that Cardoz and his team really appreciate is its automation and integration capabilities. This codeless integration platform, referred to as iPaaS, includes out-of-the-box connectors to popular systems such as Workday, Office365, Active Directory, Amazon Web Services, and more. With iPaaS, organizations can easily build integrations and automated workflows connecting various technology systems using a codeless, drag-and-drop visual workflow builder, streamlining the delivery of services even further.

If you want to learn more about how other organizations are supercharging their IT service management read our latest eBook Automate IT – A Playbook for Supercharged ITSM.

Andrew Graf

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