Planning Service Desk Automation

While considering Service Automation one of the key things to consider is how to reduce the cycle of Incident to Problem Management and Change Management thereafter without compromising quality.

Problem Management

Let’s narrow down key tasks of Problem Management in End User Support space which are Root Cause Analysis , Solution and Deploying the solution including Change Management.

Problem with Problem Management

While up to 50% of the IT service desk issues are repeat in nature many of which have an underlying root cause, most organizations fail to address these repeat incidents inspite of knowing what they are and why they occur.

We realize that there are operational challenges to reduce the lifecycle of Problem Management owing below:

• fetching relevant actionable information for Root cause Analysis
• creating and deploying the fix takes costly skills and is time consuming

Read more on how Anakage helps you address these repeat incidents using a mix of Self-Heal and Self-Help.

Desired frequency of End Point Information collection and analysis

When you really look at historic data you realize very few new categories of Incidents pop up every two quarters or so. But when they do, it takes hell lot of time to figure out the Root cause, find and deploy a permanent fix.

Implementation challenges

Most often, it is not feasible to do a RCA (Root cause analysis) due to lack of relevant information from the end points at the right time . While there are free tools like Event Viewer and paid End Point Analytic tools available to aid this process, organizations continue to grapple with too much noise in the data besides operational issues to implement such solutions given the implementation constraints on the ground, read more here

Real-life scenario

Let’s look at a probable real-life scenario of incident to problem management along with challenges that IT faces in conducting RCA and executing the identified solution:

• 0 to 12 weeks for moving from Incident to Problem management (PM) à
  • ITSM reports indicate a trend of up to 25% systems experiencing occasional crashes in the last 12 weeks
• 12 to 17 weeks for Root Cause Analysis and identifying a Solution à
  • Problem Management (PM) team rules out low RAM or hard disc as possible causes based on ITAM reports for these impacted machines
  • PM team in 2 weeks catches hold of only 10% of the impacted users to pull out Event viewer logs
  • Log analysis indicates required permissions were missing from some of the component services causing the crashes, read more here
  • A PowerShell script was developed and tested to check necessary registry settings and grant permissions, read more here
• 17 weeks onwards – Roadblock while Deploying the fix
  • Non Microsoft signed PS scripts are not allowed in environment so now Engineers have to manually run this as an Administrator on thousands of impacted machines and there is no way to proactively identify from hundreds of thousands of machines (the situation doesn’t improve even if it is just double digit number of machines as the Service Desk time is always constrained)

After nearly 17 weeks this is not a nice and expected outcome, IT is burn out, Management is not happy and users continue to loose time / productivity ….not a desired state to be in!

Anakage provides a remediation platform:

• with hundreds of pre-built solutions
• that facilitates accelerated Root cause Analysis by a Collector that pulls only the relevant info you need
• with a scriptless workflow creator to create new Solutions
• and a updater to push your new solutions to end points

Proactive CoBot can reduce 80% of your effort and time to pull out necessary information from logs using CoBot’s collector and then use CoBot’s services to run newly built remediation solutions without requiring Admin privileges.

For known issues which require user intervention and which can not be prevented from occuring sporadically, Anakage offers Online and Offline CoBots.

Anakage has consistently reduced upto 50% of the incidents at source at reduced prices from competition, thus creating stronger business outcomes for clients and partners. Get in touch with us to know more about we can help you implement a successful Service Desk Automation, click here