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10 IT Process Automation Use cases & Applications in 2024

IT process automation (ITPA) solutions support IT departments of businesses to improve the efficiency of their IT operations. McKinsey shares that during their work at two financial service companies, they found out that 90% of IT teams focus on low-value tasks like testing, deployment, and maintenance. In contrast, only 10% focuses on business priorities and market-differentiating work.

Considering that around 30% of IT teams consist of developers, IT organizations devote too little of their resources to market-differentiating work by IT (Figure 1).

Picture of bar graphs showing that 30% of IT organizations don't spend enough time to value-adding tasks.
Figure 1: 30% of IT organizations don’t spend enough time to value-adding tasks. Source: McKinsey & Company

Characteristics of top ITPA use cases

ITPA can solve this issue and help IT organizations to spend more time on business priorities by handling low value-adding tasks. Here are some characteristics of IT tasks which are suitable for IT process automation:

  • High volume of transactions
  • Stable environment
  • Limited human intervention
  • Easily decomposed into more explicit tasks
  • Prone to errors

However, of course, an IT process automation use case doesn’t have to include all these characteristics above. For example, businesses can implement ITPA tools for some IT operations with a relatively low value of transactions, but it is needed because they are performed in very high volumes.

1. Manage service requests automatically

Businesses can start IT process automation with service requests. They can leverage automation to receive and organize service queries from help desks, customer-facing platforms, and emails. While doing that, ITPA tools can filter out duplicate queries, answer frequently asked questions automatically thanks to predefined triggers and input related requests into the same ticketing system.

Alternatively, unified support platforms may also offer similar functionality. However, adopting a new support platform is harder than implementing an ITPA automation.

2. Automate asset management

IT departments can use IT process automation tools to list their software assets, continuously monitor them, and update them when needed. This enables businesses to be aware of all their IT assets’ performance. You can read more about this in our in-depth software asset management (SAM) guide.

3. Automate job scheduling

It is significant to identify which task to perform when in IT operations, like any other process. IT process automation solutions can monitor real-time events and schedule tasks dynamically to achieve a more significant impact. For that, several SLA (Service Level Agreement) measures are predefined. Then, ITPA tools schedule jobs to optimize these measures while monitoring all events in the IT system in real-time and forecasting future events and IT workload.

IT team can leverage workload automation tools and job schedulers to automate scheduling, triggering, and executing batch processes.

4. Optimize storage capacity

To maintain optimal storage capacity, IT teams need to monitor their disk space periodically. However, cleaning up disk space can be a repetitive and time-consuming task when performed manually. Another challenge is that it becomes harder to have sufficient disk space every day because of growing log or temporary files in servers. These files are created in events like crashed servers or unscheduled downtime for many applications.

IT process automation tools can perform storage capacity optimization with predefined events. When specific triggers are implemented, ITPA solutions can clean up unnecessary data from disks and optimize IT servers’ capacity. For example, when the disk space reaches a specific capacity, ITPA tools can run controls and remove or archive unnecessary files. This can also help servers to work with improved performance.

5. Automate onboarding process

Technical setup and provisioning for new employees take time and prevent technical personnel from focusing on more advanced tasks. IT process automation tools can take over onboarding processes and automate technical setup for new employees.

Explore employee onboarding automation in more details.

6. Automate offboarding process

As in onboarding, ITPA tools can also handle similar processes for offboarding operations.

Explore employee offboarding automation in more details.

7. Automate application testing

Manual tests are time-consuming and challenging tasks. IT process automation tools can speed up routine testing processes, enabling the team to test scenarios that require more creativity. This enables significant time savings, reduced costs, and a higher chance of detecting any systems errors earlier. This is also beneficial because in general, the earlier bugs are fixed, the less effort is spent fixing them.

Learn more about testing automation.

8. Security and compliance

With IT process automation, businesses can generate automatic compliance controls as part of larger workflows and perform data collection and reporting regularly. IT automation collects and structures data to gain insight and influence over internal processes. Each step of operations can be stored in a database, along with reports, permits, timestamps, and other information for compliance purposes.

Learn more about compliance automation.

9. Achieve digital transformation

Digital transformation is critical to the success of today’s businesses. IT process automation can support companies in this area. ITPA tools can accelerate the introduction of a digital transformation by creating integrated workflows for process management, workflow planning, preparation, and governance.

Explore digital transformation in more details.

10. Automate other routine IT operations tasks

IT process automation tools can automate regular daily server scans and upgrades to maintain infrastructure stability. ITPA tools can also track and operate automated system reports about performance and usage.

If this article interests you, feel free to read our related articles below:

Here are some RPA-related articles, if you want to learn more about automation:

You can also check out our list of information technology consulting services.

To gain a more comprehensive overview of workload automation, download our whitepaper on the topic:

Explore Workload Automation

If you have questions about how IT process automation tools (ITPA) can help your business, we can help:

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Access Cem's 2 decades of B2B tech experience as a tech consultant, enterprise leader, startup entrepreneur & industry analyst. Leverage insights informing top Fortune 500 every month.
Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
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Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

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