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.
What can you 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. Only with Nexthink Flow can you collect and output Employee Engagement campaign results as part of a remediation.
Automate across your IT ecosystem with API Thinklets 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 if an issue happened overnight, the device remained out of compliance, 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, which was a significant improvement over the 21 days it previously took to resolve the issue.
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 like device restart, clearing disk space, and remediating disk encryption. Even with these automations, they’re still dedicating 43% of their time to putting devices back into their desired state. And even with this strategy in place, IT is still in a reactive state, and employees are still running into non-device issues and poor experiences.
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. Once those issues are fully automated and resolved, IT can repurpose that time and focus on high value use cases like digital transformation, cost savings, and improving IT and employee productivity.
By focusing on use cases beyond device health, IT can be proactive and reduce tickets and MTTR, save costs with use cases like license reclamation and hardware refresh and impact employee productivity with software permissioning and employee onboarding.
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 aren’t able to 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 provides workflow Library packs for common use cases that you can install to fast track your progress. So you can have out-of-the-box workflows ready to go – 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, which required 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 pieces of the process resulting in 99.8% driver reliability and 0 engineering intervention.
Is your automation strategy falling short? Probably.
For most organizations today, the answers to this blog’s title question, 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 and enables you to deliver unmatched IT and employee productivity with continuous engineering.
Want to see how? Watch this session on Nexthink Flow with Accenture:
