IT Operations and Process Improvements

Workload automation (WLA) systems let you automate just about any business process under the corporate sun, including IT tasks. You can save time and money for your company by using a comprehensive WLA system to automate run-of-the-mill IT operations and processes, like password resets and software upgrades, freeing up your technical staff for more valuable endeavors.

In working with our business customers, we’ve seen that OpCon can lower IT expenses by up to 50 percent. Through IT process automation, you can boost IT management capability without hiring more IT staff. Automated operations can run unattended on a 24/7 basis, even at night and on weekends, preventing the need for “off hours” shifts and any associated overtime pay. You can substantially cut the costs of IT maintenance downtime, too.

Flexibility to meet your needs

OpCon offers the flexibility to meet your organization’s unique needs for IT process efficiency. If you perform in-house software development, you can automate the entire CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous development) life cycle. Alternatively, if you’d prefer to offload management of your OpCon environment, you can do that, too, through our OpCon Managed Automation Services.

OpCon Automation, our flagship product, improves IT process management in conjunction with three add-on modules: OpCon Self-Service, OpCon Deploy, and OpCon Vision, a single dashboard for monitoring and managing thousands of automated workflows. Read on for some helpful tips on how your company can improve your IT operations efficiency through IT process automation.

Slash the time spent on mundane IT requests

On average, company employees request password resets about once a month, some studies demonstrate. According to Gartner, about 20 to 50 percent of all help desk calls are requests for password resets. Moreover, Forrester estimates the cost of password resets to be around $70 apiece. Clearly, without the benefits of IT process management, password administration can hit hard at the bottom line.

But password management becomes far less pricey with OpCon Self-Service, a product which lets end users perform complicated workflows at the click of a button at any time of the day or night. As any IT pro can tell you, it’s hardly uncommon for users to forget their passwords when working from home late at night or over the weekend. With OpCon Self-Service, there’s no more waiting around until corporate headquarters re-opens to contact the help desk to get passwords reset for corporate email accounts. Instead, users can DIY.

The opportunities for IT process improvement don’t end there. To give just a couple of examples, you can also use OpCon Self-Service to create buttons that let business managers quickly add or revoke permissions when onboarding or offboarding new workers, or temporarily suspend credentials during compliance audits. Taking such steps removes unnecessary burdens from your IT department, too.

Save on IT downtime by automating updates

Whether we’re talking about inhouse software programs or commercial products like Office 365 or ERP, frequent software updates are a fact of life in today’s corporate environments. Updates are needed to keep your business up-to-date and your operations secure. So you can’t afford not to upgrade. But there’s a catch 22, because software updates have traditionally carried hefty costs, as well.

More specifically, a software update can range in cost from a few thousand dollars into the hundreds of thousands, according to Business.com. Those numbers don’t even include hidden costs such as the business productivity lost when operations are slowed down or unavailable during IT downtime. Each year, North American businesses lose $700 billion to IT downtime, some estimates say.

With OpCon Deploy, our change management module, you can schedule software updates for whenever you want, without worries as to business impact. There’s no need for the IT department to create workarounds for running updates during non-business hours. Scheduling updates is as simple as dragging and dropping job definitions, schedules, and scripts. If you do encounter any glitches in your software upgrade, roll back to an earlier iteration of the software to quickly and easily do any needed troubleshooting while the update is offline.

Streamline your internal software development

In fact, if your company develops in-house software, you can use Deploy to automate the full software lifecycle. This means not just software updates and deployments, but the creation, transformation, testing, and simulation of workflows all the way from the development stage to production mode.

Deploy meets today’s requirements for fast and cost-effective agile development with its full support for DevOps principles. You avoid potentially expensive human and machine errors through centralized scripting. OpCon also enables software to adapt in real-time via event-driven automation. SLAs and guided recovery actions are all built in as additional timesavers for IT staff.

Let OpCon orchestrate your IT processes

I&O operations professionals are actively on the lookout these days for ways to improve IT operations efficiency, and so are business managers. Make OpCon the centerpiece of your company’s service improvement plan for IT operations.