Executive summary

IT service tickets are also called “trouble” tickets, which seems fitting.

As enterprises of all types and sizes turn to their IT departments to advance their digital business capabilities, endless requests and alerts about infrastructure and software issues can demand and overwhelm IT teams’ time and attention.

With increasing complexity in their systems, enterprises face a greater likelihood of issues with connectivity, software compatibility, security disruptions, and data access glitches—all result- ing in service tickets.

Event-driven automation allows IT teams to deliver more responsive service because incidents can automatically be detected and remediated instead of being handled manually or relying on users to report issues via tickets.

The high cost of traditional IT service operations

IT administrators often receive a series of inquiries when users cannot log into their applications, fol- lowed by service tickets, thus creating workflows with multiple tickets for a single issue.

Even a simple router reboot or power outage at a remote site could result in multiple service tickets that take half or more of an administrator’s day to address.

Automating these workflows can free up staff to work on higher-priority service requests, which—ultimately—reduces costs.

Organizations can poten- tially spend hundreds of thousands a month handling IT service tickets manually.

Relying on manual intervention for IT service delivery may also result in lower end-user or customer satisfaction due to increased average first response times.

Among other expenses, the time agents and administrators spend actively addressing a service issue can be costly.

IT administrators—faced with tight budgets, overworked staff, and demanding business stakeholders—can struggle to deliver IT services that fulfill high expectations and demand.

IT teams need to close service tickets quickly, continuously improve service, and reduce the cost of IT opera- tions.

Adding self-learning intelligence and automation into the process can help them meet these challenges.

Inefficient IT service management often has direct financial and organizational conse- quences, including poor customer and end-user experiences, along with stress and overwork for IT staff and a lack of visibility into ongoing and likely persistent IT issues.