4 Ways HIRO Enables Effective Change Management in IT Automation
Whether you’re innovating to stay ahead or adapting to keep up, fast-paced, digital change is a fact of life for most businesses. Change is such a constant that in ITSM frameworks, like ITIL 4, managing it is about more than just solving problems. It’s about enabling more value for your company and customers.
While RPA might seem like a promising technology for enabling growth-through-change, it’s no “set it and forget it” solution. As one Forbes piece puts it, “RPA works best when application interfaces are static, processes don’t change, and data formats also remain stable – a combination that is increasingly rare in today’s dynamic, digital environments.”
In this post, we reveal how HIRO streamlines change management by deftly handling variations on a process and adapting to a wider spectrum of changes.
Accelerating Standard Changes While Unlocking Value
As defined in ITIL 4, standard changes are considered to be routine, normal, and low-risk, like granting access to a program or installing everyday software. To automate standard tasks, RPA uses hard-coded decision trees that must be updated to handle new variations. In contrast, HIRO uses AI to build a step-by-step solution based on knowledge it’s already learned and real-time contextual information. In this way, HIRO can dynamically automate variations on standard tasks or changes without costly maintenance or supervision.
For example, HIRO helped leading European telecom company, Swisscom automate its service desk and dramatically improve ticket accuracy. Previously, it used a simple automated system which yielded 50% allocation accuracy due to variations on the same requests. Thanks to HIRO, Swisscom could achieve 96% ticket accuracy, save 8,000 man hours, and automate 85% of their L2 tasks.
Overall, automating standard changes also opens up new value. In the above example, IT staff could instead focus on more complex work that delivers value for internal initiatives or for customers rather than spend time allocating and solving L1 or L2 tickets.
Automating Normal, Non-Standard Changes End-to-End
Many businesses will face changes that are standard but not so routine. Known as “normal changes” in the ITIL 4 framework, these changes aren’t repetitive but are important enough to require some form of authorization.
Take the example of new employee onboarding. Given the various departments in any one business—like HR, finance, and operations—automating employee onboarding takes a solution that can fluidly adapt to each role. From setting up email clients and Internet browsers to installing job-specific software, employee onboarding can introduce many variations that RPA just cannot handle end-to-end. In contrast, HIRO’s ability to recombine and apply knowledge via AI allows you to automate onboarding for different roles. In fact, one IT client used HIRO to automate 26 of the 27 steps for their new employee onboarding, shortening the process from 3 days to 10 minutes.
Optimizing Costs for Hardware Changes
Managing change also means optimizing costs and minimizing risks for existing hardware. HIRO can automate many, if not all, of the steps required to monitor existing hardware and sunset old hardware. Whereas RPA can automate a few static steps in a business process, HIRO can adapt and expand to more.
One arago client, working for a global company, needed to assess 200,000 servers worldwide and efficiently decommission those that were comatose or underutilized. With HIRO, the client could automate over half of the 27 steps that it normally took to decommission one server. In turn, this automation allowed them to decommission 200 servers a month and save $6 million dollars annually. The process was 83% faster while also requiring less staff.
Proactively Preventing Unwanted Change
Similar to the above example, HIRO can monitor hardware to proactively prevent unwanted changes that can impact customer services. Unlike RPA’s deterministic, hard-coded scripts, HIRO’s AI engine understands real-time contextual data, then uses its knowledge base to dynamically automate highly variable tasks.
For example, an arago client needed to find a solution that could monitor 50K wireless access point devices for a leading fitness facility. At any one point in time, up to 500 of these devices could break at once, due to broken access points, interference and other common issues. Given this situation, the central operations team couldn’t simply restart all devices at once, which would disrupt customers’ services. Plus, working through these issues and restarting devices would take days. By connecting HIRO to its monitoring system, the team could automatically detect a broken device and restart it in minutes.
HIRO Powers Growth Through Change
In our ever-evolving digital world, managing change takes more than what RPA can offer. HIRO is ready for tomorrow’s challenges by allowing you both to automate highly variable business processes and scale your automation seamlessly. Whether you’re a new startup or an industry leader, change is inevitable; suffering through it is not.