When most customers think about automation, they immediately jump to integrations, provisioning, event management and things of that nature. While those processes are valuable, one that seems to get overlooked is internal automation done within Service Requests in Ivanti Service Manager.
A quick recap of the Service Request workspace within Ivanti Service Manager. All Service Requests are unique. Service Requests rely on 2 main functions. First, the form, where we build all the parameters or questions that are/could be potentially required to fulfill a service. Second, is the Workflow editor which gives you access to Approvals, Notifications, and Tasks and other automation tools. Together these two functions reduce the workload of your service desk and help ensure consistent delivery of services to your customers.
Speaking of Tasks within a Service Request; one thing I notice from my customers is a lot of times they are using the Tasks within a workflow to help automate a process. That’s fine, but Tasks don’t really do anything within the workflow once completed. They normally go right to the Stop block. One way to think of the Task object is to use it as a sort of checklist within the Request Offering itself. Instead of creating a bunch of Tasks in the very beginning of a workflow, put them in order of when they need to be completed.
So let’s apply this to a real world scenario. You want ISM to automatically add a user to a group once the user is provisioned. All we do is add the task “Provision AD Account” (call it want you want), and then connect the next task “Add User to Groups”. The first task will wait until it completes to move on. Make sense, right?
To recap: Think of your Tasks within a Service Request as a checklist. Put all work needing to be done within those Tasks and then once all Task are completed, the Service Request is fulfilled and the service delivery is complete. All of this can be done from the automation the workflow designer within Ivanti Service Manager easily.
These are just some of the tips that Dataseti provides to our customer on a daily basis!