AI and IT Services - Duel or Duet?

Anyone thinking to join traditional IT services or help-desk role in an enterprise is late for the party.

Why do I say this?

Have you ever experienced the time it takes from asking and getting an access to a certain business application in an enterprise? Yes, the feelings are mutual!

• Enterprises have become increasingly frustrated due to slow turnarounds from IT departments. Due to increase in business pace and competitive forces business users require immediate access to resources e.g. additional compute power, new features / analytics, monitoring, connectivity to 3rd party tools or simply more storage space.   
• Today, business users know what they need to achieve and they require it fast. However, IT departments slow it down by asking to fill out various forms and taking ages to fulfill that request. Sometimes it takes weeks as process requires approvals from people who are either overloaded or just not available.  
• Due to budgetary constraints, IT Operation teams are supporting business applications when instead independent application support teams should be performing these duties. In such a situation, IT Ops is bound to have a slow response time.
• Usually, a secure access to specific business data point is all what an end user needs to build himself a meaningful report quickly but there happens to be no data provisioning architecture like data-marts or data-clouds. Ultimately, end users have to resort to putting up a new request to engineering teams that takes long development and testing time.  

Above are just a few examples that are putting pressure on the IT agenda everyday. Next, I am highlighting some trends and ways through which IT departments can become stellar business partners.

Trends

• First of, a FinOps culture in modern enterprise is enabling the users to become more accountable and responsible for their IT demands. FinOps combined with deployment of AI/ML algorithms will auto-provision such requests after analyzing the usage patterns of various resources.
• With the recent boom of advanced language processing tools like ChatGPT, the typical IT help desk and support jobs will get further squeezed. Such automated response systems and chats bots using sophisticated AI algorithms have become extremely accurate and efficient to answer customer queries. Moreover, these ML chat APIs can be easily integrated into corporate help desk through economical subscription plans, thus cutting down the cost of dedicated IT help desk resources. 
• Growing number of data clouds, Low-Code/No-Code platforms are marginalizing the traditional role of IT as a centralized keeper of computing resources. The primary reason is that users have become tech savvy and can easily create new reports and visualizations if a standardized data platform like Snowflake is provided. Moreover, with the availability of LC/NC platforms users can go as far as developing fully functional applications and workflows that can further slash the bill for software development.
• In a typical business scenario where documents coming from suppliers go through manual checks and scanning, will automatically interface into merchandising & financial systems; either through standardized EDI networks or more advanced block chain based supply chain solutions.
• Finding new touch points between technology and end user keeping in view security and privacy will be the gold standard of new IT department. IT departments focusing and providing automated tools for a) Fault Identification, b) Trend Analysis and c) Self-healing are cementing their future in the quest for productivity enhancements and enabling leaner business operations.

End Note

If IT departments are to thrive, they have to rethink their old role of central controller and become provider of tools and platforms to empower business community; so that users can build utilities themselves rather than waiting for a new report or feature request that take weeks or months before it gets into their hands. At the same time, allowing end users to build whatever they want does not absolve IT from carefully enforcing security and privacy protocols in the platform to avoid any leaks that can put organization's trust at risk.

********************