Are Your Automations Doing Enough? 3 Signs Your Automation Strategy Falls Short
1. You need to automate your automations.
Are your task automations requiring too much manual intervention?
Today, task automations help IT solve issues by automatically executing tasks or processes. With task automations today, each step needs to be manually run, checked, and, depending on the outcome, followed up by another action.
While this kind of automation can streamline operations and improve efficiency, it fails to address more complex issues. That’s where an orchestration engine, like Nexthink Flow, comes in. With orchestration. you can create automated workflows that are built for complexity. These workflows can monitor progress, handle exceptions, and ensures that all tasks are completed in the right sequence and with the right dependencies.
In short, with orchestration, you can automate those menial, repetitive tasks that previously required human intervention in between your automations.
Here’s what you can do with Nexthink Flow that you can’t do with task automations:
Many fixes require a reboot. Today, a task automation cannot continue after a reboot has been performed. With workflows, the system can wait for the reboot and continue the remediation process after a reboot has been performed.
Act on Employee Campaign results. Use Employee Engagement survey feedback to drive remediation. For example, if users report poor Teams call quality, Flow gathers diagnostics, clears the Teams cache, and runs network tests.
Automate across your IT ecosystem with API and Connector Thinklets. Leverage 3rd party APIs and Connectors for Azure AD, ServiceNow, MS Teams, Intune and more to integrate faster and more securely.
Did you know?
A global hygiene and services organization faced a daily problem with their Ivanti Landesk Agent impacting workstation compliance and IT security. The IT team could only take action during working hours and when the device was active. So, devices remained out of compliance if an issue happened overnight, creating risk for the business. With Nexthink Flow, they were able to remediate at any time – during and outside of working hours. The workflow took 3 days to create and test, a significant improvement over the 21 days it previously took to resolve the issue. Now, the workflow can resolve the issue automatically before it creates a security risk.
2. You need to automate beyond device health use cases.
Is 43% of your time spent fixing problems related to device health?
According to the State of DEX Industry report, IT spends close to half its time each week (45%) fixing recurring problems and nearly the same amount (43%) putting devices back into a desired state. As a result, teams are stuck solving repetitive issues over and over again. IT teams want to solve problems proactively and innovate, but instead 25% of engineering time is spent trying to understand and triage incidents.
Most of our customers have implemented task automations to address device health such as device restart, clearing disk space, and remediating disk encryption. Yet even with these automations, they’re still dedicating 43% of their time to putting devices back into their desired state – a clear sign that IT is still in a reactive state. This is a problem for IT and for employees. Because while your team is focused on device health, employees are still running into non-device issues and poor experiences, and the IT tickets are piling up.
For complex use cases like SCCM, license reclamation, and device restart enforcement, you need more than task automation. You need intelligence on top of automation. You need to be able to orchestrate.
With Flow’s orchestration, IT teams can implement automated workflows to reduce the time dedicated to device health issues. With Flow’s orchestration, you can build automated workflows that handle device health issues end to end, eliminating manual troubleshooting and firefighting. Once those workflows run themselves, your IT team is free to tackle high-value initiatives like digital transformation, cost optimization and boosting both IT and employee productivity.
Did you know?
A major ERP software provider saw a 1000% cost increase for Java licenses. Every instance had to be removed to avoid the renewal. Using Nexthink Flow, the IT team fully automated the removal of each license and blocked them from being reinstalled saving this company $20M on a Java license renewal.
3. You need more PowerShell experts.
Is PowerShell code scripting, editing, and reviewing slowing your team’s momentum?
Rarely do we speak to an organization that has enough PowerShell experts. Whether because teams are shrinking or the person with the necessary qualifications can’t be found, most departments lack the resources required to write the PowerShell code they need.
Without enough PowerShell experts, IT teams can’t be as productive as possible, leaving strategic projects and initiatives to gather dust. One customer told us he is blocking 30-50 code signings a week because he is the only one in his organization that can sign off.
Nexthink Flow helps fill that expertise gap with drag and drop functionality and an intuitive visual designer that enables more members of your team, even L1 and L2 agents, to create workflows. Additionally, the workflow’s logic is stored outside of the code so it’s easier for less technical team members to understand the workflow steps. Chris Ord, IT Engineer, Staff at Qualcomm Incorporated said it even better, “Nexthink Flow reduces the amount of scripting needed and the difficulty of the scripting. It’s easier to validate your workflows and your automations. It’s ultimately a more powerful way to do intelligent, proactive IT with detection and remediation.”
In addition to the easy-to-use interface, Nexthink's workflow Library packs provide out-of-the-box workflows for common use cases that you can install to fast track your progress – little to no code required. With Nexthink Flow, IT organizations can see more input from more team members and more output as a result.
Did you know?
The Keysight Technology IT team frequently found themselves updating drivers for their Dell and HP devices, requiring an engineer to identify devices that needed updates, send the remote action fix, and then follow up to ensure they were successful. With Nexthink Flow, Keysight used the low code visual designer to build a workflow that automated the process resulting in 99.8% driver reliability and 0 engineering intervention.
Is your automation strategy falling short? Probably.
So, are your automations doing enough? For most organizations today, the answers is no. Your automations aren’t doing enough, and you don’t have enough staff, expertise and time to make them work for you. With Nexthink, you can find issues faster, retrieve unlimited data, and deliver instant fixes continuously. Nexthink Flow helps your EUC organization take proactive IT one step further to deliver unmatched IT and employee productivity through continuous engineering.
Want to see how? Watch this session on Nexthink Flow with Accenture: