IT professionals work amid advanced technology. It should come as no surprise that many IT tasks lend themselves well to automation. Automation saves time, money, and helps companies allocate resources wisely. It frees up the average IT worker’s time to execute value-added tasks within the company.
Given the infrastructural importance that IT processes play in an organization, companies must carefully review tasks before deciding to automate them. Here are
Email Signature Management
What is email signature management, and why is it so important to enterprises? Email signatures are a valuable piece of digital real estate that many enterprises ignore. A great email signature establishes credibility and gives your organization consistency in the way it presents itself to your clients.
For instance, employees using different signatures will likely project a lack of cohesiveness when speaking with clients. Signatures are also great to highlight social proof. For instance, you can highlight your Trustpilot scores or review scores within your signature. Social proof of this kind will smooth cold outreach and likely boost response rates.
Using a tool to automate signature management is essential in a growing organization. For instance, if you would like your sales reps to highlight a recent award your company won, you can make a single change within the tool, and every employee’s signature automatically changes. You won’t have to burden your employees with changing their signatures manually and ensure a consistent brand image.
The best signature management tools integrate with all email clients, such as Outlook and GSuite. You can even segment your employees and create different signatures for each segment. For example, your sales teams can have a different signature from your operations employees.
Whether it’s using add-ons, adding social media links to the signature, or adding any other relevant information, email signature management is best executed when it is automated.
Software Requests
Employees need different software and tools to execute their tasks. Unfortunately, software request management tends to be bloated, bogging down IT managers with endless requests. There are 2 steps to automating software requests.
The first is to host approved software within a repository that every employee can access. This way, an employee can search for a product that solves their issues and download it instantly to their local machine. Automation of this kind removes the need to approve and vet software every time it is requested.
The second step to automating software requests is to ensure that a software delivery network issues software licenses automatically to new users. Typically, this process requires multiple approvals that can take time. The result is frustrated employees who cannot execute their tasks, and the business suffers as a result.
Arranging a software delivery network to automatically deliver relevant software to new employees and to deliver newly requested software through an automated approvals process is the best way to reduce IT burden.
A central repository will also remove the possibility of duplicate spending on similar tools. For instance, one department might be using a tool that solves the challenges another department is facing. However, the latter might be unaware of the tool due to a lack of a central repository.
Publishing tool wikis and educating employees about various tools on offer is the best way to minimize new tool requests and centralize software approvals.
Employee Onboarding
Onboarding is one of the most critical functions of a business. It is the first time a new employee will experience the inner workings of your organization. Leave a bad impression, and it’s likely the employee will leave for a better firm once the opportunity arises.
Onboarding lends itself very well to automation since every task is defined and structured. For instance, employee contract signing procedures don’t vary much from the lowest to the highest management level. Necessary software and hardware lists are defined in advance, along with the list of back-end processes such as entering the employee’s information into payroll systems.
Automation streamlines all of these tasks seamlessly and offers new employees the best experience possible. As a result, loyalty and job satisfaction increase, preventing any feelings of buyer’s remorse. Onboarding automation is also essential when employees move up in the organization or change roles laterally.
In such cases, records must be updated on the backend. Thankfully, these records are standardized, and all of them can be used as input to an automated process. As a result, IT managers need only monitor the overall process to ensure everything is functioning smoothly instead of manually updating all records.
Automation is the Solution
Automation is thrown around as a solution quite often these days. However, when it comes to IT tasks, automation is the best solution due to standardized processes that have fixed data inputs. The result is great cost savings in the organization and better employee experiences.
