I'm working for a small business (under 100 staff) and everything and anything that needs to be done IT wise falls on one person to do. This creates a bottleneck and means someone is stretched all the way from password resets to designing our GCP infrastructure - not sustainable.
They are looking for ways that staff within the business can take on some tasks that lend themselves to being "self service" or areas where we can use more automation. We need to strike the right balance of effort/reward so while a lot can be automated, if it's going to be for something we rarely need or will take weeks to do then it probably isn't right.
So far we have come up with:
- Self service password reset
- Changes to distribution group membership
- Changes to SharePoint site membership
- E-discovery moved to our compliance department
- Fine tuning our laptop builds so they are hands free i.e. using Autopilot
- Automation of patch deployment (this is largely done through Intune)
- Standardised approach to Teams and SharePoint site creation (we have sprawl problems atm)
- Standardised laptops
- Automation of joiners leavers (low priority as there is low churn)
- Ability to self handle low risk blocked emails (spam, not phishing or malware)
I do need to ensure that staff don't go wild and that we have audit trails so where appropriate we will still need a service desk ticket but the person handling it will be outside of the IT department.
Are there any other areas that could be targeted that have worked successfully?
Is there anything that has not worked out well that people have handed over to the business?
What I want to do is put things in the "right" places - there is no need for IT to be a gate keeper for everything and get bogged down with simple things that people can do themselves.
What about tooling? Any recommendations for low cost/high value tools that can help unlock some of the above - they are fully cloud so on-prem would not be suitable. I have my eyes on Action1 and also Power Automate - just not sure yet if the latter might actually help or just a rabbit hole that would absorb a lot of time?
On the technical side there will be an exercise to automate as much as possible but at the moment the focus is on enabling the business where it makes sense and doesn't end up creating more problems than it solves.
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