Democratizing Service Automation

For organizations to be truly digitized, Service delivery needs to follow a different rhythm and democratize automation. In this article, we look at the challenges impeding Enterprises in democratizing automation and show how DigitalXC Service Cloud can help address them successfully

The case of dedicated Automation teams is fast losing relevance:

Enterprise Service Delivery today is largely ticket driven. Service needs are raised as tickets through a ticketing system and resolved by a support team. 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. The efforts for Automation are handled by a dedicated niche team. These are a set of highly skilled members that work based on a pipeline of automation needs prioritized by their businesses. Such a division of labor between automation and support teams worked well so far in pre-digital scenario. However, with rapid digitization of service delivery, it is worth asking if this model is indeed scalable?

As services become digitized in Enterprises, services no longer must be raised through tickets. In a consumer world, no one wants to raise tickets to book a cab or a hotel. Enterprise Service Delivery is on verge of a similar experience shift, where all that a user really needs is ‘an app for every service’.

Zero touch will be the norm where any service can be ordered by any user, from any device, any time and delivered instantly.

Support teams will move from resolving tickets (Service Delivery) towards self-help, self-heal, and self-services. 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 will be involved in service design and automation and look 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 a Service Delivery to be truly digitized, we need to democratize automation and make it easy for every member in the team to automate.

Challenges in Democratizing Automation within Enterprises

That is a big leap from the way traditional Enterprises operate. Here are the big impediments to scaling and democratizing automation in Enterprises today.

a. Automation requires skills and is strictly restricted to ‘qualified’ resources.

b. Speed of automation is slow because of the dependence on the dedicated automation team, their bandwidth, and priorities.

C. Automation landscape is siloed and limited to niches. There are multiple tools and platforms within an Organizational ecosystem. Automation is focused within these niches.

b. Reusability is minimal both within an enterprise and across enterprises. What is needed by one division or one Enterprise is needed by others in the same Enterprise or others. 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 Service Cloud help?

DigitalXC Service Cloud addresses this need for Enterprises to accelerate digital and to democratize automation. We enable this shift through the following levers

a. 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.

b. App-store model of subscription: DigitalXC provides an app-store model or a marketplace for subscribing 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 own services through a private app-store.

C. Unified user interface: Rather than user trying to access multiple tools and platforms for automation, DigitalXC’ s unified user interface ensures services can be easily be access / designed from one common interface across any automation tool. Simplifies automation and service creation.

D. Zero code drag-n-drop: DigitalXC’ s Service Designer provides 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 team for complex automations.

e. 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. Thanks to DigitalXC new complex services can be built in a few hours not days or months. Helps to improve speed of automation significantly. Nearly 30% of Service requests can be automated in 1–2 months or less.

And in summary, DigitalXC successfully achieves the goal of democratization through a combination of above-mentioned engineering innovations. 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 zero-touch delivery.

Please share your views thoughts on democratization of automation. Where are you in your digitization journey today