As more enterprises are shifting their IT departments to Business Technology to better serve business, the IT operations themselves need a degree of automation to “keep up with that growth” without needing to increase headcount, said Andy Nallappan, CIO of Broadcom Inc., a semiconductor and infrastructure software maker, in an article in The Wall Street Journal.

More businesses are using tools like AI and automation to optimize and accelerate a wide range of IT workflows including collaborating on and resolving tickets, or as a new employee UI by bringing work from outside apps into familiar collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Such tools have the power to make ITOps processes faster and easier and, as a result, create happier IT teams and better-satisfied stakeholders.

Nallappan said chasing these and other innovative tech strategies isn’t possible without first easing the load of IT workers. He said Broadcom’s IT department receives roughly 5,000 tickets every month from employees looking for tech support.

Since late 2018, about a quarter of those requests have been handled by chatbots, virtual assistants and other tools, powered by automation platforms.

“It’s everything, from onboarding new employee accounts, or answering questions like ‘I forgot my password,’ or ‘How do I create a new email distribution group?’” Nallappan said.

For example, with automated email provisioning, Nallappan was able to cut time spent on the manual process from 2 days per account to 10 seconds – a decrease of 99.99%.

Of the transformation, Nallappan said, “We can address a lot of our IT challenges, especially in onboarding employees and provisioning services, with much less effort and quickly with automation, fulfilling business objectives such as having greater organization and reducing costs.”

Learn more about Nallappan’s ITOps vision in The Wall Street Journal >

Pamela Seaton
About Pamela Seaton

Pamela is a journalist and technology enthusiast writing for the growing business systems community.