Manual versus automated fulfilment in self-service

Building a self service portal? Giridhar Lakkavalli offers his view

Consider virtualisation technologies and the complexities of the different platforms and interfaces.

If the user was from the IT department, he would probably know the intricacies of these, but what if the user was from engineering and just wanted to use some of the resources?

Surely, one does not want this person to also learn all the details of the virtual machine platforms.

When such scenarios emerge, one of the ways an IT department or provider can handle this is to build or buy themselves a vendor-agnostic tool which abstracts the complexities of the underlying platform for the most commonly performed tasks.

If the IT team wants to take this all the way and give the power to the end user, a self-service portal is what is needed.

It can be a key components in any cloud offering. The use case is to enable the end user to request a product or a service and have it delivered. A request at a self-service portal could involve a workflow where the user selects from various options and may also need to make a payment.

Once the process of making the request is complete, the next step is to satisfy the request. This can be done in two ways: manual or automated.

In the manual case, the IT team will need to get involved in processing the request and this could lead to quite a back and forth with the requester, should there be any ambiguity in the request.

And, depending on the nature of the request, the time to manually fulfil it could either be instantaneous or take some time. In contrast, if the process of fulfilment is automated, the time taken will almost always be the same, although of course the request could still get a positive or a negative answer.

Typically, the skill set required for manually fulfilling a request is the knowledge of configuring and provisioning a service or product, whereas for automation, the skill set is to be able to program using the published interfaces of the service or product.

For automation, it is essential the rules or policies for fulfilling a request are clearly defined – along with what needs to happen when a request cannot be fulfilled.

Since every organisation is unique, the same can be said for every self-service portal built. It is the place where the user or the consumer meets the provider, and if the provider wants to make this experience successful, it could mean simple things such as changing the logo or name, a change of workflow or a different billing system.

However, the true unique experience will come only when the self-service portal integrates seamlessly with existing systems. Introducing a self-service portal basically means that customisation has found its way into every product or platform.

I wonder what you think?

Giridhar Lakkavalli is head of VMUnify at Mindtree