Self-driving cars, 3-D printing, gene editing, and neural networks -- the technology gains around us are wonderous. Unless you work in IT. Most technology initiatives that provide productivity gains for their various constituents increase the IT support burden. Like the cobbler's children, most IT teams are working harder with less to keep things running smoothly.
The is particularly true for unified communications and customer engagement solutions. These applications enable a variety of workflow and mission-critical benefits, but are themselves often subject to manual administrative processes.
It's not intuitive, but easy to understand why this happens. Communication and collaboration solutions are evaluated and selected primarily for their organizational, not administrative benefits. As a result, the vendors focus their efforts on features and services. The issue is further exacerbated because an organization's set of technologies are as unique as a snowflake. There's simply no handy manual or technical certification programs that address each customer's unique environments.
Most UC and contact center solutions are inherently manual and oblivious of other systems. To make matters worse, they're not even collaborative in terms of administration. As a result, IT administrative processes require lots of care that gets exponentially more complex with each new platform. When the complexity grows unabated, IT organizations find themselves spending an inordinate amount of energy just to keep the various systems happily unaware of each other. This time eats into planning upgrades, changes, and other improvements.
An avalanche of constant change is hard to prevent, but its impact can be mitigated with automation. Operational efficiencies from automation are more attainable than many organizations realize. Imagine a world where a service ticket is created, serviced, and closed without human assistance. This doesn't have to be a fantasy, many organizations can do exactly this and more with the assistance of workflow and synchronization tools.
Companies that have taken this approach consistently report increases in staff efficiency, consistency, improved documentation, better resource utilization, faster response times, and reduced turnover. As an added benefit, new staff are able to become more productive much faster than in environments that haven't embraced automation.
But the most significant benefit of automation is it brings back the sizzle of information technology. As Dave Michels, principal analyst at TalkingPointz and No Jitter contributor has said, "Automation is the most critical step IT organizations take regarding operational improvements."
Download the Starfish whitepaper, "Transforming Enterprise Communications Management," to learn how:
