Modern IT teams are often one of the busiest parts of any business. From hardware resourcing and maintenance through to security planning, staff inductions and service desk tasks, there are many varied tasks to tackle each day.
An increasingly popular method for reducing IT workloads is to introduce elements of self-service into corporate IT. By allowing users to maintain some aspects of their account and to make low-level changes themselves, work can be shifted away from IT staff and onto other areas of the business instead.
In today’s post, we’ll take a look at some key self-service areas to look at for boosting the productivity of your IT team.
The Benefits of Self-Service IT Support
Self-service portals are nothing new – in fact, you probably use several yourself each day, from booking websites to online banking apps.
The theory behind them is simple; if every online banking request had to be handled manually over the phone or in person, for example, banking would be slower, more expensive, and banks would need to hire many times more staff. The same principle can be applied to corporate IT.
If your staff are manually handling password resets, email inbox management, and other low-level tasks, you’re wasting money and manpower on things which could be made self-service or even automated.
Hiring experienced and qualified staff to take on the complex responsibilities involved in running your business is a significant waste of money if they’re then asked to handle simple, ‘menial’ jobs instead. Removing tasks like this from their day can instead make your team more productive and cost-efficient.
Making these tasks self-service frees up expert time to deal with more pressing and business-critical issues, allows them more time to focus on efficiencies and security (which can pay off financially in the long term), and can even mean fewer staff members are needed overall to handle the workload.
Examples of Self-Service
When looking for areas of your business which can be made self-service, try to identify the simple ad-hoc tasks which frequently distract your IT team from bigger issues.
A great place to start is with password management. Having your service desk manually manage password resets, whether in-person or over the phone, can take up a significant amount of time – cutting productivity and, undoubtedly, frustrating your team. Instead, put processes in place that allow staff members to manage and recover their own passwords. You’ll probably still need a manual system in place, just in case, but this one small change can cut a lot of work from your service desk’s workload.
Group management is another great example which would usually take up service team time but which can easily be made self-service. Enabling group owners to manage members and their access not only saves IT staff time but can also save other teams time too, and cut down on unnecessary wait time between teams.
It’s possible to take group management one step further and to automate the process instead – saving even more time and cutting down on work for your IT team and other teams too. Dynamic groups can be established with rules that add or remove members based on certain criteria, such as job role or location, making staff management easy while cutting out a traditionally tedious task.
These are just two simple examples but there are many more areas that can be automated or made self-service in this way.
The Foundations of Self-Service
The right technological foundations are key to supporting any self-service initiatives. For example, Single Sign On (SSO) architecture enables your employees to access all the corporate resources they need with one set of credentials, vastly simplifying the process of password management.
New on-boarding technologies such as Apple’s Device Enrolment Program (DEP), Android Zero Touch and Windows 10 Autopilot can fully automate the enrollment and configuration of end-user devices when used in conjunction with an Enterprise Mobility Management platform for a true Out of the Box Experience (OOBE) – a topic we’ll be covering in more detail in one of our upcoming blogs.
Completing a thorough analysis of your workload, processes and existing technology can yield a number of quick-fix changes that can make your IT team significantly more productive.
For more on cost and productivity wins with an Out Of Box Experience, be sure to check out our ultimate resource for secure device freedom here.
