Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/141720
Simply put, the mission of collaborative operations technology within today's new IT organizations is to increase the dissemination and use of institutional knowledge and automation tools to make businesses more efficient; provide users a forum to collaborate, share experiences and contribute innovative ideas in way that benefits the user and their employer; and harness weak ties across organizational boundaries to strengthen operational excellence, thereby increasing the pace of innovation and learning within the enterprise. Industries such as communications, transportation and finance are pioneering the use of social media and leveraging the power of people to drive success across processes that are critical to network operations, customer care, provisioning, help desk, cloud services and other business areas. Knowledge Peter Drucker once said, "Knowledge is the source of wealth. Applied to tasks that we already know, it becomes productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes innovation." Apply this same precept to an organization and you'll see why knowledge management is an IT cornerstone – and in fact, it is critical for generating ongoing business intelligence, encouraging ongoing knowledge sharing, and creating a continuous cycle of actionable feedback for use at every level of the organization. At the same time, when it comes to IT skills, clearly there is a crisis of epic proportions confronting today's IT organizations. Highly skilled subject matter experts (SMEs) are expensive, and they cost significantly more than a level one agent to employ. But what if you could empower your level one technicians to resolve issues that previously could only be handled with two or more escalations? How much could you save by minimizing escalations? Collaborative operations practices help organizations resolve the skills crisis by capturing the knowledge of SMEs to create an "actionable" and dynamic knowledge repository driven by an enterprise social media platform. Collaborative operations allows organizations to realize the true potential of IT operations by unleashing the knowledge hidden within the different teams, groups and people throughout the company; identify and capture processes to more effectively manage increasingly complex networks and support requirements; and create an "actionable" and dynamic knowledge repository driven by an enterprise social media platform. Automation Last but not least is automation. The IT automation space has spawned a host of powerful automation tools that encapsulate the knowledge and best practices that organizations have developed through the years. Creating automation today is becoming as easy as drag and drop — and emerging new automation tools are giving IT teams new ways to save time and resources, and reduce the repetition that takes the innovation out of IT. The combination of collaborative knowledge sharing with the ability to easily automate processes results in a solution where the sum is greater than the whole of the parts. By embedding collaboration in event management processes, run book automation and help desk workflows, the entire organization becomes engaged and empowered to resolve issues faster and more efficiently. Taking it a step further, when a customer care solution, for example, integrates with leading CRM and contact center tools to deliver a truly social-centric experience for automating customer service and support (CSS), a more holistic and effective approach to customer care is taking place. By supporting existing CSS processes and tools and even embedding social collaboration to deliver powerful automation capabilities directly to contact center personnel, IT is enabling customers to solve their own issues quickly and efficiently. Through a more collaborative approach to IT, all participants in the customer care resolution process are also able to share and collaborate on support procedures – even interact in real-time with SMEs across the organization. The result is reduced customer churn through better quality of service; increased productivity, with agents able to do more in less time by capturing knowledge from social threads into a case or ticket record; and reducing the percentage of transferred calls and escalation.