AI, bots, and RPA are shaping the way work gets done.
94% of senior IT leaders say a future-ready enterprise is their top objective. This ITSM-ITOM platform will lead the way there. Read this whitepaper to learn more!
According to Mihir Shukla, chief executive officer of Automation Anywhere, the definition of “work” is at a changing point.
Today, technologies — including artificial intelligence, analytics, chatbots, and robotic process automation (RPA) — are combining to create what he calls the “digital worker,” which will augment human workers.
“In 10 years, what we now call ‘work’ won’t be called work,” he said at the September BMC Helix Immersion Days event1. “When you want something done, your first stop will be to see if a digital worker is available. You’ll download it, as you would an app from an app store, configure it, and then get the work done.”
Shukla suggests this will enable a level of productivity never seen before in human history, and it will lead to superior customer and user experiences. Consider a reimagined IT service experience. “When a service ticket can be resolved by a bot, the response time is six seconds,” Shukla said. “If you can solve a customer issue in six seconds, imagine the value in that. If you can solve anything in six seconds, customers are going to love that.”
For such an experience to become reality, organizations must take into account how IT functions are organized, as well as key technological trends and expectations that need to be addressed:
- multi-cloud, multi-device, and multi-channel
- DevOps
- artificial intelligence, bots, and RPAs
Table of Contents
Today’s IT Challenges
The first step toward ITSM and ITOM convergence is recognizing today’s obstacles to IT service delivery. The most significant obstacle is that in the majority of enterprises, IT functions operate in silos.
“The two worlds of IT services and operations have been separated for ages, not just in terms of tools and technologies, but also organizational boundaries,” said Nayaki Nayyar, president, digital service and operations management, BMC, at the BMC Helix Immersion Days event.
With a lack of coordination and integration, there is repetition of efforts and insufficient service responses — both of which lead to a negative cycle of added complexities and inefficiencies.
For example, the service desk typically is the first point of contact for employees and customers who report an issue. Yet, because this function works in isolation from ITOM, the desk often lacks the necessary information to correlate an incident with a specific infrastructure component or identify the root cause. This wastes time and causes frustration, which could have damaging results if the customer chooses to turn to a competitor that can better serve their needs.
Working in silos creates another challenge: an overall lack of IT visibility. There are too many unknowns, including what assets organizations have in the cloud and on-premises, and how much these assets are used, and at what cost. There is little insight into vulnerabilities, events, and issues. These unknowns limit productivity and lead to inefficiencies, unnecessary spending, and poor customer experiences.
CIOs are under pressure to transform and innovate. In today’s multi-channel, multi-cloud, multi-device landscape, it no longer is sufficient to just make do with a lack of integration.
Senior IT leaders realize change must occur; they must be strategic and ensure future-readiness, which, according to a recent IDG survey2 (see Figure 1), is their top IT objective.
Future-Proof Requires ITSM and ITOM Convergence
On one level, ITSM and ITOM convergence are a cultural one; it involves collaboration between these two functions. Yet, to make this combined effort work in practice, organizations require a shared technical foundation. Rather than a series of point solutions, enterprises need a platform with full integration and orchestration for seamless, automated service delivery that leads to positive business outcomes.
An integrated end-to-end ITSM and ITOM platform powered by AI/ML reimagines the service experience by holistically integrating the abilities to:
- discover assets, whether in the cloud or on-premises
- proactively monitor events and deliver alerts
- proactively deliver service across the enterprise for IT and the business
- remediate issues before they occur
- optimize costs and IT capacity
This technical foundation integrates AI, chatbots, and RPA to speed IT service delivery with greater accuracy, while delivering superior customer experiences across multi-cloud, multi-devices, and multi-channels such as Skype, Slack, and SMS.
In addition to positive business outcomes, an ITSM-ITOM platform breaks down cultural silos for greater IT productivity and visibility. For example, having insight across IT infrastructure, configuration items, and specific applications enables the service desk to improve response time and resolve issues faster, without wasting ops resources or causing customer frustration.
An ITSM-ITOM platform with automation capabilities proactively monitors assets, looking for vulnerabilities and anomalies for predictive IT services. This reduces the potential for redundant efforts across teams while freeing them for strategic innovation.
A Necessary Cultural Shift
For such a technical foundation to work, organizations must bring people into this cultural shift, which starts with a strategic vision from the top.
Assuming talent and technology are equally available to everyone, the catalyst for making a difference is “fearless leadership,” said Trung Quach, senior director of IT infrastructures and operations, Videotron, who is leading his company’s IT efforts to digitally transform. “You can’t be scared of doing things, and you have to be a salesperson with ROI skills to make sure the mindset [of the workforce] will shift.”
A successful ITSM-ITOM convergence also requires training, skillset mapping, and a vision toward the future workplace. “AI is and must be seen as an augmentation technology,” said Sanjay Srivastava, chief digital officer, Genpact, at the BMC Helix Immersion Days conference. “It must enable our workforce to take advantage of it to deliver higher levels of performance. But it doesn’t happen by itself. We, as a company, have to invest in [training] and cross-skills toward a vision of that future workforce.”
Enterprises must be able to lean on their vendors, according to the IDG survey. The majority of IT leaders (86%) agree they need technology partners who will help their systems perform better, so they can create ideas that will help the entire business organization prosper.
BMC Helix: Uniquely Positioned to Support Future-Ready Enterprises
“I call what we’re trying to address as the ‘tech tsunami,’ ” said Nayyar, pointing to an IT environment of multiple clouds and multiple devices, and an explosion in data volume. Also, Ops and engineering are coming together in the DevOps world using RPA bots.
“All of this is further complicated by the diverse workforce,” she continued, “which now has five generations of employees, all wanting to communicate in different ways, whether that’s with Slack, SMS, Skype, etc.”
BMC Helix is uniquely positioned to tame this tsunami of factors. It is an all-in-one, converged ITSM-ITOM platform powered by AI and machine learning.
There are five key pillars integrated throughout BMC Helix:
- Discover: BMC Helix Discovery provides a comprehensive and holistic view of on-premises and cloud resources and dependencies, with continuous content updates. This includes multi-clouds and hyper-converged infrastructures such as containers, software-defined networks, and software-defined storage.
- Monitor: BMC Helix Monitor covers the application and service-centric performance monitoring, including physical, virtual, public and private cloud, as well as event and logs analytics with probable-cause analysis to pinpoint problems. It also conducts synthetic and real end-user experience monitoring and automated event remediation.
- Service: BMC Helix Service combines the agent experience with chatbots and intelligent swarming, cognitive automation — including deep learning for ticket classification and email analysis — and cognitive insights for smart reporting. It also supports DevOps, including CI/CD with change/release automation and integration with the DevOps toolchain.
- Remediate: BMC Helix Remediate provides built-in security and automation across cloud and on-premises environments for regulatory compliance, operational governance, and automated remediation.
- Optimize: BMC Helix Optimize improves the utilization of IT resources and reduces repetitive administrative work. It optimizes costs and capacity for all infrastructure — compute, storage, and network across the data center and cloud environments. It improves planning and predicts the impacts of growth.
“Next, you augment this platform with bots,” said Nayyar. “That level 1 or level 2 service desk that used to be very manual — you automate that through omnichannel bots, like a Slack bot, Skype bot, and SMS bot, to transform the service experience and better drive the cost, accuracy, and experience delivered. Our BMC Helix RPA bot integrates with CRM, ERP, Excel, Web apps, legacy systems, and more.”
BMC Helix Chatbot is conversational AI with tone and sentiment analysis and has the functionality to transfer to a live agent. It also automates password resets and software updates, while supporting federated search across knowledge sources.
“All of this comes together on the backend to provide a superior user experience with BMC Helix Digital Workplace,” Nayyar said. “A consumer, customer, or employee can use one single pane of glass to get whatever service they need – for example, an IT, HR, or procurement service — and get it fulfilled.”
BMC Helix Digital Workplace is a device-agnostic with a unified service catalog across IT and all lines of business. It provides brandable superior experiences across B2E, B2B, and B2B2C environments.
The Bottom Line
As we hurtle toward the future of work, IT leaders must adopt a fearless approach to strategic, holistic change. Today, AI, bots, and RPA are shaping the way work gets done, and an ITSM-ITOM platform built on these technologies offers a comprehensive way to be future-ready.
BMC Helix is the future of this service platform.
“Think of it like a utility,” Shukla said. “The way we flip a switch to turn on a light… that’s the way service has to happen.”
That’s BMC Helix.