An Enterprise Guide to IT Service Management, Robotic Process Automation, and the Digital Workplace
This guide will look at all components relating to IT service management (ITSM), robotic process automation (RPA), and the digital workplace, explaining how they link together and why they are important to achieve true business transformation across your organization.
What is IT Service Management?
IT Service Management (ITSM) is the process in which a team manages the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers. At the heart of ITSM is the belief that IT should be delivered as a service. ITSM includes all processes and activities to design, create, deliver, and support IT services.
What is ITIL?
ITIL stands for the IT Infrastructure Library. According to CIO.com, ITIL is a framework of best practices for delivering IT services. CIO explains that ITIL’s systematic approach to IT service management can help businesses manage risk, strengthen customer relations, establish cost-effective practices, and build a stable IT environment that allows for growth, scale and change.
ITIL offers a systematic approach to IT service management which enables organizations to manage risk, strengthen customer relations, establish cost-effective best practises, and build a stable IT environment that is primed for growth, scale and change.
What is the difference between ITSM and ITIL?
ITSM is the actual practice of managing IT operations as a service, while ITIL is a set of best practice guidelines for ITSM.
Why use ITSM? What are the benefits?
- According to Ivanti, there are twenty benefits to using ITSM:
- Improve efficiency
- Reduce operational costs
- Risk free implementation of IT changes
- Improve accountability through standardization
- Improve accountability within business functions
- Improve effectiveness
- Improve visibility into operations
- Improve visibility into performance
- Increase self-service productivity
- Better service and customer experience
- Improve access and communication channels
- Reduce unnecessary workload
- Achieve a better ROI on the corporate ITSM investment
- Enable more effective planning
- Save the business time
- Save the business money
- Manage change for efficiently
- Improve collaboration between different business functions
- Better transparency into IT processes and services
- Higher return on IT investment
Why integrate ITSM into the digital workplace?
There are a host of benefits that will derive from integrating the ITSM platform into your digital workplace strategy:
- Improve the employee and customer experience
- Automate processes to fuel productivity
- Respond to change quickly
- Save costs
- Minimize risk of data error or data slippage
ITSM, Automation, and Hyper Automation
One major element of ITSM is automation. Automation improves productivity, transforms the employee and customer experience, and empowers an organization to respond to change quickly. Automation is at the heart of any digital workplace strategy and any successful ITSM implementation. Increasingly, companies are moving towards hyper automation – the way in which we automate as many processes as possible using tools like AI, machine learning, event-driven software, robotic process automation (RPA), and other types of decision process and task automation tools.
What is robotic process automation (RPA)?
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a form of business process automation technology that makes it easy to build, deploy, and manage software robots that emulate human actions and interact with digital systems and software.
There are different types of Robotic Process Automation:
- General RPA is known for general IT process automation, such as reading invoices, data capture, finance and claims processing
- Digital workplace RPA is known for automation that is specific to the digital workplace
What does robotic process automation (RPA) do?
RPA uses software robots to automate repetitive tasks and manual processes. RPA can take care of nearly any task that is driven by rules and schedules. These are often mundane tasks such as taking data from multiple applications, inputting the same information into multiple places, re-entering data, copy and pasting.
Who uses robotic process automation (RPA)?
Any organization that wishes to automate a manual task or process will benefit from RPA. RPA is used in most industries, especially in highly automated workplaces and in industries that use supply chain processes, such as insurance, banking, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and telecommunications.
Why is robotic process automation (RPA) growing?
According to Forrester Research, the robotic process automation (RPA) market is expected to reach $22 billion by 2025. The research reveals that RPA software is expected to grow to $6 billion while services reach $16 billion in the next three years. With hybrid working the “new normal”, organizations are embracing RPA to provide greater efficiencies, improve customer experience, and ease the management of business operations.
What happens when you combine the power of robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI)?
According to Techtarget, when combined with AI and machine learning, RPA can capture more context from the content it is working with. For example, by reading text or handwriting with optical character recognition (OCR), extracting entities like names, invoice terms or addresses using natural language processing (NLP), or by capturing more context from images, such as automatically estimating accident damage in an insurance claim picture.
What are the benefits of robotic process automation (RPA)?
One very appealing feature of RPA software is that it is very easy to adopt; organizations can usually implement it without having a deep technical understanding and without changing the underlying IT infrastructure. In addition, here are three key benefits of RPA:
- Reduce costs by introducing repeatable automated processes
- Streamline processing to improve efficiency
- Drive better customer and employee experience
RPA and ITSM Integration
RPA excels in speeding up business processes. However, if the RPA strategy isn’t integrated into the overall ITSM infrastructure, automated workflows will become unreliable and often fail.
What is Industry 4.0?
Industry 4.0 (also known as the fourth industrial revolution or 4IR) is changing the way that companies manufacture, improve, and distribute their products. By adopting and integrating the very latest technologies (including IoT, cloud computing, performance management and analytics, AI, machine learning and RPA), organizations are harnessing interconnectivity and smart automation to improve the industrial landscape.
According to Wikipedia, the fourth industrial revolution is the trend towards automation and data exchange in manufacturing technology and processes.
The digital workplace, industry 4.0, RPA and ITSM
At the heart of it all is automation:
- Businesses increasingly rely on RPA and ITSM, both of which are underpinned by automation
- The digital workplace is essentially about enabling a automating enterprise communications and collaboration
