Resolving IT issues in a remote set-up with Process Discovery

With the COVID-19 reaching pandemic status, nearly all industries, from Travel and Healthcare to Life Sciences and the Public Sector, are trying to find new ways to protect themselves against the spread of the virus as well as mitigate its long-term effects on the economy. Most companies across geographies and sectors are following the ‘work-from-home’ movement to try and ensure business continuity during these uncertain times, thus minimizing the impact on operations. Many government and medical agencies have also issued guidelines for companies and individual practitioners to work in a remote setting. However, economists around the world believe that such a set-up could potentially generate a worldwide productivity slump, introduce unprecedented challenges, and threaten economic growth for many years to come.

Let’s take support functions of an organization, for instance. Support functions such as HR, Admin, Legal, Finance, and IT Support are accustomed to working in an office setup where connectivity problems are a rare issue. These functions are likely to face major challenges due to the shift to working from remote locations. Out of these, the support function that will probably be affected the most would be IT Support. Issues range from hiccups in VPN accesses to problems in system compliances, network and system accesses, system crashes, and application errors, among others. In an office setup, the IT Support team can work with the employees to see where they are going wrong. They can even keep an employee’s laptop in the IT Support lab for inspection and try and recreate the error scenario to identify the root cause. However, due to remote working, carrying out such activities is no longer possible.

Automated Process Discovery, while discovering process nuances at its core, comes to the rescue in such a scenario. A process discovery technology is one that can capture all the digital interactions made by the employees at a granular level like keystrokes, mouse clicks, and copy and paste operations. Details of the exact transaction the user made, each value entered, screen viewed, button clicked along with screenshots can be captured. Additionally, it can capture the entire flow of transactions that the users have made, and all the applications that are being used.

The data captured is then documented in terms of detailed steps leading to the issue. Moreover, to provide a visual representation of the data, task flow maps are also generated. All that the employees need to do is to have process discovery running at their end. Once the product has provided its outputs, the IT support team needs to go through the outputs to analyze the RCA as quickly as possible and provide a fix accordingly.

Automated Process Discovery can enable the IT Support function to complete their IT tickets remotely, and much faster. This will, in turn, save employees’ efforts of — trying to troubleshoot the issue on their own, sharing umpteen system logs, or getting on a call and continuously sharing their screen to try and resolve the issue. Overall, it will save not only time but also crucial infrastructure. Employees can continue to focus on their work without disruptions and get their issues resolved in time, thereby leading to happier employees and more productive outcomes even in this hour of crisis.

AssistEdge Discover is a leading process discovery product that captures and leverages user’s digital interactions to create business process maps and transformational insights that aids organizations in process improvement, automation, and efficiency. Powered by empirical data, the outcomes are free from human biases providing a powerful foundation for operational excellence and continuous improvement.