For Mark Hayes, information technology leader at Pima County, much of the digital transformation work starts in IT. “TeamDynamix is a place where we are really trying to kick-start and accelerate the ideology that automation with the right tools can bring value not just to IT, but to other departments within our organization. We’re starting in IT, so that they can see the possibilities as we move forward with our digital transformation and expand outside of IT.”
Pima County made the switch to TeamDynamix for IT service management (ITSM) after using a different system for the last 10 years. Traditionally, the county has taken in tickets through email, phone and a service catalog with base-level triage, but with TeamDynamix in place, they will be able to leverage self-service and automation to better serve its citizens and reduce the drain on employees and resources.
AUTOMATING ITSM TO REDUCE REPETITIVE MANUAL TASKS
Aside from performance issues with their old ITSM platform, Hayes said the county is looking at ways to combat both resource drain and employee burnout with their new ITSM in place.
“Prior to TeamDynamix, we didn’t have the ability to automate things and build workflows to do things that eliminate toil and redundancy for our employees,” Hayes said.
And with many organizations struggling to maintain or hire new talent, especially in IT, this was critical for the county. “People feel so much more empowered and have so much more worth when they are doing things that are intellectually rigorous and challenging versus when they are just repeating the same mechanical actions over and over and over with very little thought,” Hayes said.
“Our ITSM is our entry point to our entire IT organization, and we want our employees to graduate out of this area into other roles within our organization – network technicians, client services, desktop technicians, developers and project managers,” he continued. “If all they’re doing is managing tickets and doing the same mundane, manual tasks over and over, that’s not particularly great training. So, investing in tools that allow our employees to engage in meaningful work is something that’s important to us as an overall IT organization.”
With TeamDynamix now in place, Pima County is looking to automate and integrate as many of the manual ITSM processes into workflows as they can.
“That’s something the organization is really just starting to comprehend as a vision that we want to get to overall,” Hayes said referring to automation. “My goal and hope is to make sure people understand the possibilities of workflow beyond just getting approvals routed because that’s all that we really do today.”
ENTERPRISEWIDE INTEGRATION AND AUTOMATION WITH iPaaS
Beyond automating ITSM tasks and processes, Pima County is also investing in TeamDynamix iPaaS – integration platform as a service. With iPaaS, the county is looking to integrate systems beyond just IT to automate processes like onboarding and offboarding employees.
“We are starting small, hoping to use automation to take tickets and automatically deploy software to endpoints, to onboard and offboard users with active directory and distribution groups,” Hayes said.
AUTOMATING THE ONBOARDING/OFFBOARDING PROCESS
When it comes to onboarding new hires, the county’s goal is to have new employees arrive on day one with everything they need to get to work. “You don’t need to waste so much time when it comes to onboarding,” Hayes said. “It really is such a sour experience for a new hire to come in, in this day and age, and sit around for three days waiting on their computer to show up. We need to get out of that mode and iPaaS is going to help us do that.”
In addition, using iPaaS to automate offboarding will save countless hours for a process that is normally very manual and heavily audited as Pima County is a government entity.
“As a government organization, we get audited by the state every year, and they want to know what these stale accounts are doing sitting here,” Hayes said. “Offboarding is currently a very manual process – having to review the list from HR of people who are no longer employed with us and manually revoking their privileges from all the different systems and software and disabling their accounts. There’s absolutely no reason for that to not be automated. iPaaS is going to help us a lot with this and save us time.”
BUILDING CONFIDENCE IN IT TO DRIVE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WITH TEAMDYNAMIX
While the digital transformation journey is starting in IT at Pima County, there are plans for TeamDynamix to expand outside of IT for true enterprise service management.
“The drudgery of working through mundane, repetitive tasks doesn’t exist just in IT,” Hayes said. “I think the more we can reduce toil within the departments that we support, the more people are going to buy in and understand the value of what we’re trying to achieve. There’s nothing like success to breed more success, and once other departments see the benefits they’re going to want these tools too.”
And it’s that success that IT is starting to realize with ITSM and iPaaS from TeamDynamix, “We’ve been able to use our success to drive additional headcount in our organization, to do more and better things,” Hayes said.
“As we begin to do automation via workflows, it’s only going to make it better,” Hayes concluded. “We’re lucky in that our leadership understands that as the world has changed, IT has become the center of everything. They know that the more they invest in us, the more they can reap benefits and savings in other places.
WHY INTEGRATION AND AUTOMATION MATTERS FOR ITSM
As Pima County illustrates, by using an ITSM tool that includes integration and automation, you can free up your IT resources by automating the everyday, repetitive tasks that normally need to be addressed before working on bigger projects – things like system name changes, resetting passwords or granting certain permissions to software. All of these, and more, can be automated with workflows using iPaaS with your ITSM.
By combining iPaaS with ITSM on a single platform you can automate both complex and simple tasks, as well as connect disparate systems throughout your organization.
With a codeless platform, like TeamDynamix, you get the added benefit of anyone being able to use these tools – not just IT. By allowing lines of business to create their own workflows, you can free up your IT resources to work on larger projects and eliminate the logjam when it comes to integrations within your organization.
Here are a few other ways iPaaS with ITSM can help reduce IT drain on an organization:
- Facilitate enterprise integration by using a single hub with pre-built connectors to systems that you use every day as well as a connector concierge for the creation of specific connectors. (Imagine being able to automatically change a username, add someone to a distribution group, onboard an employee.)
- Expedite creation of automation and workflows with a visual flow builder (codeless) that is easy to use, own and operate; reduce IT backlog of integration and workflow requests.
- Optimize resources across IT to allow for improved output and a higher level of service delivery to your internal and external customers by removing redundant data entry and manual processing.
- Reduce API risk with a single connectivity platform that will offer increased oversight and control
To learn more about how organizations, like Pima County, are using TeamDynamix automation with ITSM check out the latest e-book: Automate IT - A Playbook for Supercharged ITSM
