Disrupting IT Service Management through Automation

By Frank Cammaroto, Director Technology and Operations Services, AMP

Frank Cammaroto, Director Technology and Operations Services, AMP

Innovation, an ‘experience’ mindset, and delivering services differently through automation and artificial intelligence will reshape IT service management. In the not too distant future, traditional support processes such as level 1 and level 2 support will be eliminated.

Automation must be approached from a customer and service mindset rather than with an aim to just reduce cost. In the early days of robotic process automation, automation was incorporated to reduce cost whilst simply automating an existing process. For example, the use of bots may be more economical but if the bot runs the same complex and slow business process, the customer and user experience does not improve.

Automation can also become an addiction—you have to be thoughtful about it. It’s about flipping the way you look at it. Rather than looking at only saving money and keeping the same process, instead look at creating an end-to-end service experience and automate that. This will naturally trim cost.

As it service management continues to be disrupted by automation, it’s extremely important to maintain a service experience mindset

A good example of starting with the user experience was in mid-2017 at AMP. We implemented the use of bots for our ticketing system. Our aim was to eliminate tickets at the first point of contact. Our delegator bot auto-routed tickets through supervised machine learning. We also had two additional bots which actioned tickets and catered for API based integration as well as legacy style screen-based commands. Finally, we used an insight bot to analyse tickets to generate insights through the data. We thought about the end-to-end process and looked at the ecosystem the bots were working in, rather than looking at each bot in isolation. This resulted in cost savings but most importantly a great service experience.

Bringing together automation as an ecosystem with a focus on the customer and service experience can be a differentiator when implementing automation. We did not focus on a single tool or technology.The approach was to understand the environment and deliver automation as part of the ecosystem. This ensured the optimal technical solution was implemented at the right point and the entire automation ecosystem worked together.

Automation is a big part of service management at AMP today. We handle more than 15 percent of service and 80 percent of system access requests through automation. Further, More than 600 tickets a month are auto-routed and 1000 tickets actioned. Automation has seen improvements to our cycle time from 7.5 hours to under 6 minutes.

Finally, as IT service management continues to be disrupted by automation, it’s extremely important to maintain a service experience mindset.