6 trends fueling the rise of self-service IT

To excel in today’s challenging enterprise landscape, IT teams need prompt access to applications and data spanning all business units. By deploying a self-service delivery model, IT can overcome most issues related to cumbersome manual access processes and deliver resources to end users efficiently and securely, just-in-time, says Vasu Sattenapalli, CEO of data management software developer RightData.

Self-service is now a fact of life for just about everybody, Sattenapalli states. “We’ve all become used to being able to serve ourselves in a variety of situations, such as with online shopping, banking, and so on,” he observes. Sattenapalli believes the biggest gap IT organizations face is bringing the consumer experience to data access. “A self-service portal that would give data consumers a one-stop-shop for discovering, exploring, access requests, and consuming is what is lacking in the industry.”

Sattenapalli expects that innovative companies will soon develop platforms opening the door to self-service data and application access.

6. It can also democratize data

Business and data analysts often grow frustrated when they can’t find trusted data, struggle to articulate their specific data needs, or when a colleague or customer takes too long to deliver necessary data. Self-service IT can resolve all of these challenges by “democratizing data,” making data more easily accessible to users.

While democratizing data through self-service sounds like an ideal goal, putting it into practice can be daunting. “Many data leaders remain reluctant to adopt self-service data initiatives,” says Diby Malakar, vice president of product management for data intelligence platform provider Alation. He notes that data democratization will require a formalized and structured approach to governance to pinpoint where exactly data is located and to assess data quality. “Otherwise, self-service could compromise data security and bring compliance into question.”

Democratizing data requires organizations to centralize their data knowledge — classifying it by origin, description, and historical use — and decentralize access. This is data intelligence, a self-service analytics approach that gives users access to the knowledge they need to quickly search for, discover, and use the right data for the project at hand, Malakar says. “IT is no longer responsible for disseminating trusted data for every request, removing bottlenecks, and empowering business users to harness data more effectively in their daily work.”

The catch: Self-service requires constant attention

While self-service can free up IT resources by empowering users to address their own IT needs, anyone thinking self-service IT is an entirely hands-off endeavor is in for a surprise.

As self-service IT’s scope widens, it requires constant attention in order to maintain a deep repository of accurate, serviceable knowledge. Kimberly M. Hollingsworth, associate director of the enterprise service desk at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, notes that meeting this goal requires a behind-the-scenes process of rigorous, iterative, and ongoing cycles of gathering content, reviewing existing components, remediation to capture updates or retirement of items, and creating and maintaining the channels used to share information with users.

Self-service IT’s fundamental trust is built on its offerings’ timeliness, accuracy, and usefulness. “In a dynamic technological environment, information and details require an aggressive and proactive approach to content management in order to ensure relevance and accuracy,” Hollingsworth says. “This is the essence of knowledge management, with the goal of creating self-service tools and reliable knowledge repositories that ultimately create a better and more delightful end-user experience.”