At The Cloud People we know that some of the core concerns for IT are how to automate business processes, and increase productivity and data visibility across the business. That is why we have specialized in the Service Operations approach, to help our customers enhance the delivery of resilient and cost-effective services.

To work efficiently and provide exceptional (customer)service it is important for Service agents and Operators to have the same reference point. However, what we see is that departments often run separate applications and digital systems. While this approach may benefit a specific department, it adds inefficiencies to the organization as a whole. When systems, technology, processes, and tools exist independently without centralized access to shared data, the divisions between technology services and operations teams hinder their ability to operate and deliver services effectively. In other words, this approach can make it difficult to collaborate, prioritize and make thoughtful decisions across departments. 

By adopting a step-by-step approach to Service Operations, organizations can establish a strong data foundation through a reliable Configuration Management Database (CMDB), modernize services and operations on a single platform, automate self-service options for employees, prevent incidents in systems, and ultimately optimize process efficiency and workforce effectiveness.

By assessing automation opportunities at one of our customers, we identified that request lead times were heavily influenced by delayed approvals.

To improve in this area, we implemented Virtual Agent functionality, using MS-Teams to push medium and high priority approval requests to approvers.  During the working day, this allows the approvers to instantly approve (or reject) relevant requests, which significantly reduces the request lead times and thereby make the process more efficient.

Providing push-notification functionality with Virtual Agent and a corporate chat application like MS-Teams, is a strong case for adopting VA to automate processes and to reduce lead times for different items.