Automate Service Catalog services — fulfillment, approvals, and provisioning

Overview

Manual fulfillment processes are a constraint on the scalability, consistency, and speed of service delivery. When every step requires a human to act, the capacity of the service delivery operation is limited by the number of people available, errors accumulate through manual handling, and fulfillment times vary unpredictably. Also, there are so many services that need to be performed in any given enterprise such that it becomes clear automation is the foundation for scaling, speed to delivery, higher quality results, and lower cost to deliver.

Best Practice

Identify the service request fulfillment processes that are highest in volume, most repetitive, and most rule-based, and automate them progressively. Start with automating approval routing. Then automate fulfillment steps, beginning with the simplest and most predictable services. Over time, build toward end-to-end automated fulfillment where technically and operationally feasible.

It is a best practice to establish a formal automation governance policy that defines standards for how automation is designed, tested, monitored, and maintained.

Benefit(s)

Automation delivers compounding benefits that grow as it is applied more broadly. Fulfillment times drop from days to minutes for automated services. Consistency improves because automated processes execute the same way every time. Fulfillment teams are freed from repetitive work and can focus on complex requests that genuinely require human judgment.