The Zero-Touch IT Checklist: What it Takes to Automate IT Ops

Automating IT tasks can help improve the employee experience, but the steps to getting a program started might not be immediately obvious. Thomas Donnelly, CIO at BetterCloud, shares a step-by-step checklist for automating your IT operations.

Onboarding new employees is a critical function at any organization, but at most companies, the process is manual, resource-intensive, and introduces a series of hassles. For the average IT department, onboarding requires over 50 touchpoints with a number of different systems – including the applications that new employees need to access to get up and running. This is generally a slow and cumbersome process that often takes days, stalling productivity for employees. Luckily, there’s a simple answer to this problem: automation. 

The onboarding of new employees is just one example of many functions in the enterprise that call out to be automated. Case in point: 92 percent of IT professionals feel they spend too much time on repetitive work that could be automated, according to findings from BetterCloud’s recent “SaaSOps Automation Report 2022: The Rise of Zero-Touch ITOpens a new window .”

This is precisely why we have seen more and more companies adopt zero-touch IT principles. Zero-touch IT reduces or even eliminates the need for human involvement to complete a business process, enabling IT professionals to focus on more strategic tasks. Most importantly, zero-touch provides a faster, more reliable, better user experience and improves job satisfaction, not only for IT teams but for employees in general. The faster IT can resolve an employee issue or request, the quicker that employee can get back to working at full capacity. And, in consumer-facing jobs like customer service, that can mean a happier customer. This kind of virtuous chain reaction often occurs with zero-touch IT. 

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Zero-Touch: Where Do You Start?

We know there are many processes that need to be automated in the enterprise because they often fail or cause problems when handled manually. Others are merely inconvenient and costly but should be automated so they will run faster, better, and without errors. Everything from hardware and software provisioning and onboarding / offboarding employees could use the zero-touch “touch” (no pun intended). 

The questions we hear most often about zero-touch IT are how and where to begin. Let’s break it down.

• • Rally your troops: Zero-touch IT is new to many. To get underway, get your team and resources aligned. They don’t need to be seasoned zero-touch IT pros or technical coders, but they should be eager to innovate workflows and improve the employee experience. Once the initiative powers up, hire an automation expert and assign them to more complex workflows that are challenging to convert to zero-touch. A more experienced expert can also refine your existing zero-touch workflows.
  • Examine bottlenecks in IT: To select which workflows/processes to automate first, look at your most common requests. Study the requests that reoccur, their frequency, and the more time-consuming issues that frustrate employees, partners, and customers. They are leading candidates for automation.
  • Acquire the Tech: Obtain the right automation tool, such as a SaaS management platform, if you don’t already have that in place. Choose a low-code or no-code solution that enables every person on your IT team to automate workflows.
  • Deploy your team in stages: Begin by apportioning 5 percent of your team’s time to automating workflows. Why just 5 percent? Starting small is less disruptive and can be completed with your existing team. Once you gain capacity with these automations, you can use this time to automate more. Using this step-up approach, 5 percent quickly becomes 10 percent and then 20 percent or more. In other words, as you gain skill and experience, take on bigger automation challenges.
  • Communicate across the entire organization: Be proactive and inform stakeholders about the changes zero-touch will bring about. Communicate the value and impact increased automation will have across the entire company, not just IT. This is integral to elevating IT’s role in the company. 
  • Prioritize resources: One option is to position the candidate workflows for automation in a Gartner-style matrix. The Y-axis shows the number of tickets for a workflow, and the X-axis approximates the time employees spend on each instance. This communicates the overall time that employees spend per issue. 
  • Measure ROI: You can’t improve without feedback. Forecast the ROI of your efforts by calculating the expected savings in time and money. Use data to validate that the automation is comprehensive and performs correctly. For example, if you automate onboarding, track how many tickets you receive on average in the first 30 days. If it’s more than zero, chances are that your automation missed a step or two.
  • Feedback and follow-up: Processes are dynamic, so revisit them and listen to feedback about one month after the initial automation. After the big leap from a manual process is completed, its replacement—the automated workflow—requires commonsense maintenance. 
  • Sky’s the limit: Create “moonshot” goals to push the limits of automation for your most complicated and time-consuming IT workflows. But wait to tackle these ambitious projects until the team has some experience in implementing zero-touch automation.

Zero-Touch is the Present and Future

The bottom line is that a zero-touch approach works. Here at BetterCloud, once we automated the onboarding of new employees, we witnessed a stunning drop in the volume of related tickets. The number of tickets dropped by half, and the ripple effect of resolving each issue completely and correctly the first time included the prevention of future tickets.

Zero-touch shifts IT from reactive to proactive mode and even prevents inefficient workflows from taking hold in a company. To be clear, zero-touch is not an argument for reducing IT headcount. Rather, it frees up IT to focus on more strategic, business-level endeavors. 

But to automate workflows correctly and conduct an entire zero-touch program effectively, we strongly recommend that you communicate early with your constituents, the people who will become stakeholders. Once they are all on board, follow the checklist above, and you can successfully pave the road to a more automated future. 

How are you enabling the automation of your IT operations? What are the challenges that you’re dealing with? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

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