“How do you improve IT services and what are the benefits of using AI and automation?” Find out on this episode of Appfire Presents: The BEST Work Management Show by Appfire. Emily Peet-Lukes chats with Fabian Lim from Contegix, about practical ways to improve IT services and the benefits of using AI and automation.
About the guest
Fabian Lim is a senior consultant at Contegix with extensive experience in managing technical projects in the software and hardware industry.
About the show
The BEST ITSM Show by Appfire brings you expert insights for IT service delivery, so your employees and customers have what they need to succeed. Get the right tech and tips for the right job at hand. Look like you’ve come from the future with all your new ITSM smarts. Every episode is a brisk 10 minutes—less time than it takes to provision a laptop or troubleshoot a tech support issue.
For your convenience, here is the transcript of this episode:
How do you improve IT services and what are the benefits of using AI and automation?
Emily: Today we have Fabian Lim with us. Fabian is a senior consultant at Contegix. We are going to be discussing how to improve IT services and the benefits of using AI and automation, so stick around.
Hey, Fabian. How are you today?
Fabian: I’m doing great. Thank you.
Emily: Thanks for joining us.
Fabian: You’re welcome.
Emily: You’re here to talk about improving the overall performance of IT services, as well as how AI and automation fit into the mix. I’d say that optimizing ITSM is always top of mind for industry experts. What do you think?
Fabian: Absolutely. We’re always trying to work with clients to ensure that they can resolve tickets, incidents, and changes as fast as possible. So, it’s a very important topic.
Emily: Yes. Let’s jump right into some of the questions.
How to effectively manage and prioritize IT service requests to maximize efficiency and productivity?
Fabian: That is a great question. There are three points I always tell my clients.
The first point is regarding getting the right information when they’re creating the tickets. Not just the contact information and the description, but let’s try to get things like the urgency, the priority, if the issue is reusable or not. Those things need to be there so that we can use automation and other tools to assign those tickets properly.
The other thing that I always tell them is once you have those fields in there, let’s use those fields to grade the priority. Based on priority, you want to make sure that high priority tickets get tackled right away, while lower priority tickets you can tackle later. Once you have things like the urgency and impact, then you can do some sort of risk calculations to calculate the priority and then reassign that to the proper teams and proper on-call people that are solving those issues.
Emily: It’s kind of like a step by step prioritization process that gets the tickets pushed to where they need to be and in the right hands.
Fabian: Right.
Emily: Awesome. Shall we move to the next question? What are the benefits of using AI and automation in ITSM, and how do you implement these technologies into your organization? You mentioned some AI and automation in the last question, so can you elaborate more on that?
Fabian: One of the things that Atlassian provides with Jira Service Management is Jira automation. One of the key actions that provides you in Jira automation is the assignment of issues. Based on who requested the ticket, based on the services that were selected in the custom fields, you can actually reassign the tickets to whoever bandwidth to deal with it, and use that automation to properly set the agents with the correct workload.
Another thing that we always use with automation is, for instance, one of the apps from Appfire, which is Canned Responses. One of the key features on that application is when you’re trying to close a ticket, you usually click resolve and then you have to enter the same comments, “We resolved your issue,” and then transition the ticket. With Canned Responses, you can just click the panel that says close this issue, and then it also automatically puts the comments in there and transitions the ticket at the same time.
Emily: That sounds super helpful for workflow and just communication efforts in general, being able to communicate exactly what is needed and what needs to happen in the next steps. Those Canned Responses seem like such a helpful tool.
Fabian: Yes. The other one that we also use a lot is Power Scripts. For example, when you’re doing change management, one of the things we notice is a lot of the risk assessment clients have a lot of questions they want to get the customers or clients to answer, and then based on those questions you can come up with a risk level. With Power Scripts, we’re able to put weights on the different questions, and based on their answers, then you can come up with a risk level. On those risk levels, you can then decide whether it’s an automatic approval or if it’s something that the managers or board members need to approve. That’s another great way to use automation to simplify the workflows.
Emily: It sounds like it. Anything that streamlines or takes away any sort of risk or challenge within a process is a great way to use automation to make the service better.
Fabian: Right.
Emily: Any other apps that you use for automation or any things that you want to share?
Fabian: The SLA breach. Atlassian does provide the SLA objectives, but then you can use within 30 minutes if it’s going to breach, let’s remind our agents that they need to action this right away or we’re going to get in trouble. A lot of those built in automations are very helpful.
Emily: It takes the weight off of you from having to remember when something is going to happen in a timely way. None of that gets dropped. If it’s automated, it just goes out and notifies people.
Fabian: Right.
Emily: Speaking of AI and automation, I have another question for you. What do you feel is the future of ITSM and what emerging trends and technologies do you feel will shape the industry in years to come?
Fabian: I’ve seen a lot of requests from clients about collaboration. Collaboration with MS Teams, or with Slack, and being able to swarm together to solve those incidents. I’ve been able to recommend a lot of the applications.
My favorite in this case is the NextUp.ai application where customers can just open up a chat and then create a ticket and get information to resolve their issues right away. NextUp.ai allows you to do that, and it also integrates very well with Jira Service Management and Confluence. It’s basically helping you shift left where you’re trying to let the customers figure out their issues on their own before you actually create a ticket where it needs an agent to take care of it. NextUp.ai, we love that app, and we believe that it could make a lot of changes in the future.
This trend with chat operations is growing quite a bit, so the collaboration and integration into those apps is very important.
Emily: It sounds like the word on everyone’s lips at the moment is chat AI, how interacting with a sophisticated AI can dissolve some of those simple problems so that an agent then can focus on more complex things, and it empowers the users to troubleshoot on their own comprehensively. That’s exciting, and I’m glad to hear that there are some emerging trends that are going to be super useful.
Lastly, Appfire and Contegix are teaming up at this year’s Pink23. What can we expect from this?
Fabian: We’re going to have a booth at Pink23, and we’re going to focus on how you can leverage Jira Service Management to elevate your ITSM solutions. We have a templatized ITSM solution where we look at a lot of the applications from Appfire and then leverage those functionalities and features to enhance how you can solve your incidents, change management processes, problems, and it also includes the chat operations use cases in the booth to demo for everyone.
Emily: That’s great. It sounds like a real dynamic duo, and it’s going to be a really cool event.
Fabian: Absolutely. We’re looking forward to it.
Emily: That’s great. Fabian, thank you so much for being here today and talking all about optimizing ITSM and using AI and automation. We really appreciate you.
Fabian: You’re welcome. Thank you, Emily.
Emily: Of course. A quick note, Appfire and Contegix will be teaming up for this year’s Pink23, the annual ITSM conference that will be held February 26th through March 1st at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. You can register today and come by our booth (#405) to talk to our experts on best practices and methodologies such as ITIL, lean IT, agile, dev ops, and organizational change management. It’s going to be a good time.
Thanks so much. See you next time.
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Last updated: 2023-03-21
Emily Peet-Lukes
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