# What is Service Automation?

> Source: https://bryter.com/blog/what-is-service-automation/

Whether working in-house or for external clients, knowledge workers are constantly delivering services. But what is a service exactly, what are today’s limits, and how is service automation changing this? This article explains how:

## What is a service? 

Let’s start with the concept of a *service*. It’s the delivery of an intangible, knowledge-based asset that provides value to a customer or a colleague. 

There are 3 simple steps in service delivery: 

Example time! 

As you notice, the same framework of (1) an input, (2) advice or knowledge-based action, and finally (3) an outcome can be applied to every service. Whether you’re a tax consultant assessing the implications of business travel or an employment lawyer advising freelancers. Whether you are a business service provider setting up a new branch for your corporate client, or a People manager onboarding a new joiner that joined your firm. Input, action and output is the rhythm you are operating at. 

## What are the challenges of service delivery today?

One word: scalability. It’s often hard to do more work without more hands – or as we like to say: more brains. You do both the onerous manual tasks as the complex reasoning, but they are often so connected it’s hard to outsource just that first part to someone else. There are three simple reasons for this: 

Besides scalability, this has some further drastic consequences. We note the following three: 

## Service Automation to the rescue

[Services Automation](https://bryter.com/service-automation/) allows to solve these challenges and go beyond the limitations.  It tackles the three root causes: 

#### Maneuver

Turn manual services into digital applications. Accessible everywhere, anytime, at a fraction of the cost.

Enable users to quickly maneuver and capture tipical subject matters.

#### **Monetize**

Turn manual services into digital products. Commodities are scalable assets, allowing providers to add revenue, expand the portfolio and turn cost centers into profitable units, servicing clients internally and externally.

#### Manage

Keep an overview on service offering and content. Share and collaborate. Provide a digital repository for teams and departments without the risk of failing knowledge transfer or creating silos.

#### **Measure**

See what services are needed, how they are used and how users consume these service offerings.

Benefit from business process intelligence in an area that was manual and intrasparent before.

And consequently also turns threats into opportunities: 

In the end, what service automation does, is upskilling the experts to deliver digitally.

## Core elements of service automation platforms 

What’s in a word. Service automation is designed with services in mind. This means it needs the technical components to represent a service digitally. In short, they correspond to the 3 steps in a service: input, action and output.

![Core Product Artefacts of a Digital Service](https://bryter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/group-121-1-1920x1080.png)

_*Figure 2: core product artefacts of a digital service *_

The above figure shows the string of actions well. On the left data is collected, in the middle it’s processed and on the right, the output happens. Let’s quickly zoom in on these required features: 

The whole feature list can look somewhat overwhelming at first, but as we’ve been saying all along: services are complex animals that need a tailored approach. If you look at any of your services, you’ll quickly see that the process inherently breaks down into these features. We just offered a way to make all of them digital. 

Example: you’re asked to adjust a high volume of contracts to reflect the impact of new trade regulations. There’s a request coming in, some text is extracted, and specific rules are applied that change the content of this text. A new document is generated. This can happen up to 95% automatically, leaving you to think of your company’s strategy to think proactively about the strategic implications these contract changes are having. 

Or this one: you’re assessing a data breach. The data breach is first investigated. Some more inputs are required. Then an evidence-based decision is made. All assessed inputs are stored in your content management system, as well as the logic that you apply to assess the data breach. The assessment trail can, later on, be audited and improved. Service automation frees you from keeping track of different cases yourself, maintaining and storing documents and allows you to gain insight into what really happened. 

![Major Causes for Failing IT Projects](https://bryter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/group-122-1920x1080.png)

_*Figure 3: service automation unlocks a tremendous use case potential*_

Despite these two examples being quite different in nature, they require similar product features, that can be adapted quickly to your use case. They are too complex to do through personal projects, yet are too individual or require too many turnarounds to spending large amounts on IT. And in the end, your service will be digital and scalable, or not be at all. 

Service automation is more than just a trend and more than a concept. BRYTER is all about enabling experts to scale their knowledge. But our [no-code platform](https://bryter.com/no-code-platform/) is part of a bigger context, recently taking shape: [book a demo](https://bryter.com/get-demo/) to see how BRYTER can transform your business too.