ITSM: How to Automate IT Provisioning

At its core, IT Service Management (ITSM) offers a strategic framework that leverages advanced technologies to automate routine, repetitive, and time-consuming IT processes. By embracing ITSM, organizations can optimize resource allocation, reduce human errors, accelerate task completion, and ultimately enhance operational efficiency.

Traditionally, IT teams have been burdened with an array of repetitive, labor-intensive, and manual tasks that consume valuable time. As the likelihood of human errors increases, service disruptions, security vulnerabilities, and dissatisfied users also increases.

In this post, we will identify how ITSM can be further automated and provide real-world examples of how organizations can leverage the Celigo Integration Platform to overcome common IT challenges. Celigo automates and optimizes end-to-end business processes using embedded business expertise. Together, these capabilities allow you to accelerate your digital transformation across your organization with scale, reliability, and governance within a single platform.

ITSM Automation Use Case Featuring an HRIS and ZenDesk

The main issue we want to address and solve is the pressing need to reduce response times of the IT team, ultimately freeing up valuable IT resources. In today’s fast-paced business environment, prompt and efficient response to IT incidents, service requests, and technical issues is a top priority. Lengthy response times can lead to frustrated end-users and employees, productivity bottlenecks, and potential loss in revenue.

Here, we will highlight the example of automating a ticketing process in Zendesk to equip new employees with a desk and a computer using Bamboo HR as an HRIS to retrieve new employees and ZenDesk as a tool to create tickets for asset management. However any endpoints such as ADP, JazzHR, BreezyHR, NamelyHR, ServiceNow, Jira, and others can be used.

1. This is the overview of the entire flow. There are 4 total steps within the flow: an export step, along with a hook script, a lookup step with response mapping, and two import steps.

2. The first step in the flow, the export step, retrieves all employees within the company that have been updated since the last time the flow has been run. This includes deleted employees, new employees, and promoted employees. By pressing preview, we are able to preview the data and see that the page of records shows our expected output.

3. The JavaScript hook on the export allows for all the employees that are new to be in a separate array. New employees are identified when the action is equal to “Inserted.” After they are identified, they are moved into a new array where we can see the function output only shows new, inserted employees. Although there are other ways to have this data filtered out, a hook is created to show just how extensive Celigo can be to highlight how in-depth a technical user can create more technical flows.

4. The next step in the flow, the lookup step, finds the individual employee by their ID and grabs their first name, last name, and other relevant information that are all shown in the query parameters.

5. Then, a response mapping is performed to ensure that the employee information is moved to the final steps of the flow.

6. Now that all the information from BambooHR is ready to be moved into Zendesk, the third and fourth steps will be creating the tickets needed for the desk and computer request, respectively. Both of these steps are identical for the import settings and the field mapping both shown here. The desk request creates a new ticket by selecting Tickets from the API Name dropdown and using the Create operation.

The mapping for the desk request is as shown. The subject, comment body, and requester ID are mapped accordingly, and the requester ID is shown as a member of the IT team, so they can be found easily. The output shown on the bottom right displays all the correct information with the proper fields mapped accordingly.

7.  The same settings are then used for the Computer request.

The same mappings are also used for the Computer request. After confirming the output is expected in the output preview window, we can save and close this window and start running the flow.

Summary

You’ve just created a flow to help expedite the ITSM process and continue to help your IT team! This automated process can also be the start to an entire hire-to-retire process by beginning to orchestrate onboarding and provisioning in various other accounts.

Another example of how this flow can be expanded on is to add notifications in social collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Adding this as a final step in the flow will be able to show users in specific channels when new employees are hired or when access to an account is granted.

This flow is just one example of how your organization can begin its automation journey. Many other business processes can also be streamlined and automated with the right integration platform. Celigo is the leading enterprise-wide automation company with a unique process-centric approach, enabling organizations to discover, automate, and optimize business processes at scale.