Lifecycle Management

  • 6 min read

3 Ways To Leverage IT Automation In Evolving Workplace

Tathagata Chakrabarti

23rd February, 2023

SHARE ON:

Automation gives you the power to be efficient, flexible, and ready for an uncertain future. However, to leverage automation, it is crucial to regularly update tools to meet the needs of an evolving workplace. 

Automation has innovated business processes, but leveraging technology for business success is still essential. This is due to high competition with the rise in the number of applications that manage business processes. Successful organizations optimize their daily tasks by using CRM, CMS, ITSM, and other business tools that hold the capacity to improve business operations which brings cost effectiveness, time efficiency, and better ROI to the organization.  

As evolving businesses focus on saving cost and time and want to receive better results with every project, you should push these tools to their fullest potential. Thus, if you still desire more efficiency, leveraging automation is the most productive way. 

Now, let's see what changes take place in an organization.

In the world of digital transformation, certain things are likely to change in organizations. Here, we will discuss two primary changes that occur in an evolving workplace. 

• Reconstruction of organizational structure

When an organizational structure is reconstructed, the employees either end up happier or more confused. At times the workforce sees that they have lesser tasks to handle, while at other times, they may find themselves burdened with new responsibilities. The companies also create a new team, remove individuals from a role, appoint them elsewhere, or merge roles and departments. 

There are also times when the companies merge with other businesses or are bought by an organization. This brings in new employees to the environment, and the roles are moved around; for example, the managers may have new mentors. And this acquisition leads to training requirements in new software that the fresh structure obtains. Ultimately, there will be a need for more automation due to the expansion of the company and an increase in processes. 

• Change in company goals

With the enterprise's growth, the goals set earlier either are no longer applicable. The objectives of an evolving company enter a new market where new competitors, demands, and more bring changes to objectives and how an organization works and performs. 

Furthermore, the evolving company goals bring along the need for more investors and their new demands, new political factors, trends, impacts on the end user, change requirements in customer experience, etc. 

The shift in company goals ultimately raises the need for new software and leveraging of the existing automation systems to meet the bigger requirements.   

Here are the 3 ways in which you can leverage automation in the workplace:

3 Ways To Leverage Automation In The Workplace

Automation is the key to staying flexible and ready for an unpredictable future, whether returning to a physical office, working from home or a mix of both. By automating daily-repetitive tasks, IT can dramatically improve the employee experience and set strategic priorities for its work, which makes the team a business partner for the whole organization.

1. Automating the SaaS management process

Developing an IT strategy will be challenging if you do not know what your present IT infrastructure is capable of or how well your unit is doing. It's common for organizations to make service delivery and support techniques based on best guesses instead of data-driven facts. This can be dangerous because best guesses aren't always that good, and you might expect too much. 

You can see how well everything in your IT environment works using monitoring tools. And by monitoring how things work, you'll better understand which part may need to be updated or even replaced.

So, monitoring tools help you better use your limited IT budget and prevent you from paying for things you didn't expect. Also, the data from monitoring tools are hard to argue with. This makes it more likely that "the powers that be" will agree to pay for these costs since the justification is there in black and white. 

Therefore, getting SaaS management software is important for an organization. Zluri is one such SaaS management tool that helps IT teams manage SaaS apps so the IT admins can detect, manage and optimize them. It is an all-in-one tool that automates the entire SaaS management process. 

Zluri has the world's largest app library, with over 225,000 apps. It ensures that no detail is overlooked, providing a complete picture of your SaaS investments, including details like consumption, users, compliance status, security measures, and costs.

It finds apps that aren't supposed to run in the organization and lets you do something about them to eliminate shadow IT. Moreover, it gives app insights in real-time. Find out who acquired the app, who uses it, and how often. 

In addition, it helps you stay compliant by ensuring that all the apps in a SaaS environment meet the compliance standard for the industry as a whole.

Auto-renewals are another problem for SaaS users. Though supplied to simplify your renewal procedure, you never know if a product is used or valuable to your organization. If so, you may want to stop or downgrade.

Auto-renewals and too many SaaS apps make it hard to remember app renewals. Therefore, Zluri sends renewal reminders 30, 15, and 1 day before the due date. In addition, Zluri sends 7-day and 1-day alerts for payment, giving you time to decide what to do.

Zluri's license module gives all details related to licenses, subscriptions, contracts, and perpetual. By comparing applications and licenses, insights like quantity and cost assist decision-making.

Moreover, it shows each user's license count, next renewal, license type, cost, and payment method. As a result, Zluri gives IT departments more control and insight over SaaS applications and licenses.

2. Automate onboarding and offboarding

Automated onboarding and offboarding provide new hires, contractors, vendors, and partners they need from day one and remove access on their last day. It improves their experience from day one and makes tasks easier for your HR or IT teams.

Onboarding automation helps the IT teams ensure that new joiners get access to the right tools and smoothen the approval process.  

Onboarding automation tools include pre-built integration and other advances that simplify user provisioning. Such automation has freed up time for IT teams that would have otherwise been spent on customization. In addition, this method puts all digital identities into a cloud-based directory for secure access management that works with all organizational tools and resources (as is user-permitted).

Centralizing all the SaaS apps makes it easier for IT teams to keep track of user permissions. Access creep is a risk after an employee leaves because the IT team can only remove permissions that are known to belong to that user. But the modern way involves automating the removal of permissions that aren't needed. This stops access creep and shows even more that the core is essential.

So, if the onboarding and offboarding processes are automated, a company can stay caught up by wasting time on such repetitive activities. Zluri is capable of helping IT teams automate employee onboarding and offboarding. Moreover, it makes this whole process faster and more secure.

Zluri can provide work tools on the first day of onboarding or even before. Zluri's use of case-driven process automation is unique. The system contains lots of data to assist users in developing workflows. Zluri uses customized workflows that examine the new hire's job profile, seniority, and department to offer them access to applications instead of utilizing cumbersome templates.

During offboarding, when employees leave the company, Zluri ensures they no longer have access to all the apps they use. Then, before the licenses expire, Zluri copies the data in those apps, which you can then give to the new owner.

3. Automate app requests and SaaS approval processes (self-serve model)

When IT takes longer to give access to SaaS apps, it reduces employees' productivity and leads them to buy them without IT's permission. This increases the use of shadow apps in the organization. These shadow apps can cause SaaS sprawl and wastage, like duplicate apps, abandoned apps, licenses with high-pricing tiers, etc. 

On the other hand, employees need to learn what tools are available to them in their department and the company. Lack of visibility makes it hard to choose the right tools, which slows down productivity. Employees need to have a view of all the tools in the company so they can select the IT-approved tools for their job.

Therefore, there needs to be a self-serve model available for employees which streamlines the app requisition process. For example, Zluri's employee app store allows employees to make license requests and track the status of such requests. 

If your organization's SaaS stack does not include the applications employees want, they can also request those applications. Also, this procurement request can be forwarded to Zluri's SaaS buying feature to get a better deal than most IT and procurement teams can get on their own.

Employees can find out things like what apps they use and what apps their department uses. This makes it easier for employees to choose the right apps for their needs. 

The IT teams can now speed up the SaaS approval process by automating it, setting up the number of approvers, and choosing which apps and app data departments and employees can see and which they can't. This saves a lot of time for IT teams, and since all SaaS app purchases are made in front of IT teams, there is no space for shadow IT.

Want to know more about how Zluri helps you leverage IT automation for your workplace? Book a demo today!

About the author

Tathagata Chakrabarti

Tathagata is a Technical Content Writer with 4+ of experience in the SaaS industry. He has a keen eye for research and understanding macro trends in the SaaS & AI-based technology space. He has worked across several marketing & strategy roles in various domains like banking, e-commerce, and education sectors. In his leisure time, Tathagata is a full-time PC gamer.