Explore Agentforce IT Service

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Apply Agentforce IT Service capabilities in a real-world, end-to-end IT scenario.
  
• Illustrate how the service management processes of Agentforce IT Service collaborate to resolve complex IT issues.
  
• Explain how Agentforce IT Service contributes to delivering timely, quality, and reproducible IT services.
  

Meet Orivian Global Holdings

So far, you’ve explored Agentforce IT Service’s key features. Now, follow Orivian Global Holdings as the company applies them to solve its various business needs. Orivian Global Holdings is a diverse and expanding international conglomerate with significant operations across multiple industries. Here are some of the solutions that Orivian offers to its customers.

• Orivian EduTech develops and provides online learning platforms and IT infrastructure solutions for educational institutions worldwide.
  
• Orivian BioSolutions is dedicated to biotechnology, pharmaceutical research, and the development of unprecedented medical devices.
  
• Orivian HealthSystems operates a large network of hospitals, clinics, and health insurance services, managing vast amounts of sensitive patient data and complex medical IT systems.
  

Scope Matters

For Orivian Global Holdings, everything matters when it comes to IT related issues. Some issues are global in nature, impacting all divisions and locations, while others are more localized, affecting specific countries, regions, or individual industries.

For instance, a global VPN service outage in Orivian Holdings, affects employees across all Orivian industries worldwide. In contrast, Orivian HealthSystems’s compliance with the United States healthcare data privacy regulations, such as HIPAA, is a challenge limited to only the US.

Widespread Outage at Orivian

Take a closer look at an end-to-end example that shows how Agentforce IT Service helps Orivian from problem report to resolution and documentation. Notice the progression highlights where service management processes discussed earlier play a role.

Employees across Orivian’s different divisions—including Orivian EduTech, Orivian BioSolutions, and Orivian HealthSystems—begin experiencing widespread connectivity problems. This manifests as additional latency, or in some cases, a complete inability to access the corporate network via VPN. This issue quickly escalates into a global VPN service outage that impacts all holdings and employees worldwide. As latency increases and access decreases, employee frustration rises and productivity drops. If Orivian’s IT teams do not address this quickly, customer satisfaction (CSAT) rating also goes down.

Reporting and Initial Response

As reports flood from Orivian employees using request management from various geographies and divisions, the system triggers Agentforce IT Service’s incident management capabilities, focusing on quickly detecting, reporting, and resolving service interruptions. The system automatically categorizes the high volume of related reports as a major incident candidate.

Slack integration facilitates real-time communication and helps affected employees submit generic tickets directly from their Slack workspace. Orivian’s global and divisional IT teams use Slack to initiate swarming, and rapidly assemble subject matter experts to fix the issue.

Investigation and Root Cause Analysis

The IT team uses the configuration management database (CMDB), the central repository for IT infrastructure data, to quickly gain a holistic view of the affected VPN hardware and software. The CMDB, bolstered by Agentforce and AI, assists by suggesting related configuration items (CIs), summarizing dependencies, and assessing the full scope of the outage’s impact across Orivian’s global operations. Initial diagnostics point to a recently deployed security patch to the corporate VPNs as the potential culprit.

The IT team then invokes problem management to identify the root cause and prevent future recurrences. The root cause analysis reveals that Orivian rolled out the security software patch to corporate VPNs without adequate testing, introducing an unforeseen incompatibility that caused the severe latency and access issues.

This highlights failure in adhering to change management and release management ITIL–like best practices, which aim to minimize IT change risks through structured planning, approval, and implementation and to ensure smooth transitions and minimal disruption of software releases.

The AI-based risk calculation feature within change management could have potentially flagged this during the planning stage, preventing the incident.

Salesforce designed Agentforce IT Service to simplify the process of planning, scheduling, and controlling your software and hardware release deployments. For instance, providing details such as the description, priority, release type, risk, ownership and relevant dates are easy to create and manage.

Next, check out Orivian’s approach to resolving the outage and preventing future occurrences.

Resolution and Future Prevention

After problem management firmly identifies the root cause, the IT team, augmented by Agentforce’s AI–driven assistance, determines the appropriate course of action, which involves either reverting the faulty patch or deploying an emergency hotfix. The IT team plans and approves this corrective action using change management, ensuring proper procedures are followed to minimize further disruption.

Release management then manages the deployment of this fix, aiming for a smooth and efficient restoration of service. After the IT team stabilizes the VPN service, knowledge management becomes essential for long-term prevention. IT creates a new knowledge article detailing the incident. The article explains the incident’s root cause—the inadequately tested security patch, the resolution, and best practices for thoroughly testing all future security patch deployments. AI assists in drafting this article, which the IT team then makes available to empower faster support and self-service for any similar issues in the future.

New Hardware Request

Building on the efficiency you just saw with many service management processes, look closer at how request management helps with a common IT need: hardware requests. Imagine that a new employee needs a specific piece of equipment. With request management, they can easily log in to a simple, user-friendly portal, find the item they need, and place their request with minimal effort.

At Orivian BioSolutions, a new medical device engineer has received their standard equipment, including a phone, laptop, and docking station. However, their specialized design and modeling tasks require a large, high-resolution monitor. Instead of complex internal procedures and a slew of emails, the engineer turns to Salesforce Agentforce IT Service’s request management. They sign on to request management and experience a user-friendly portal that taps into a unified catalog of various hardware assets available to employees. An Agentforce Slack integration helps them request a 27-inch monitor. Easy, isn’t it?

Behind the scenes, Agentforce IT Service uses its service automation capabilities to quickly route the request for approval and fulfillment to the appropriate IT team. The engineer receives automated notifications, keeping them informed as the request progresses from submitted to approved and scheduled for delivery. Thanks to this seamless and efficient process, the monitor is delivered, and the medical device engineer can immediately begin their critical work and maximize productivity.

Diversity Matters Too

The scenario for the new medical device engineer at Orivian BioSolutions perfectly illustrates how request management provides them with the specialized equipment they need to be productive. It makes sense for that role in that division. However, it's important to remember that Orivian Global Holdings is a diverse international conglomerate with operations across multiple industries. Other roles in other divisions have different IT needs. For example, a sales representative working for Orivian EduTech, is much more likely to require a lightweight laptop or tablet for mobility than a large monitor for intricate design work.

This is where the power of request management, the unified catalog, and service automation comes into play. Agentforce IT Service is designed to adapt to varied needs, ensuring that hardware items, services, and workflows it presents to a sales professional differ from those it offers to a medical device engineer. This tailored approach, which aligns with ITIL–like best practices, helps maximize productivity across Orivian’s diverse workforce by ensuring every employee gets the appropriate tools for their specific job, efficiently and without unnecessary clutter.

Wrap Up

Thanks to Salesforce Agentforce IT Service, Orivian Holdings is now fully equipped to tackle complex widespread challenges and common needs and turn them into opportunities for continuous improvement.

In this module, you got a comprehensive overview of Agentforce IT Service, starting with the foundational principles of IT service management (ITSM) and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. Then you delved into service management processes and explored how Agentforce powers supporting elements and enhancements to work together. Now, you are ready to use this knowledge to improve crucial IT processes at your company. More power to you. Agentforce power that is!

Resources

• Trailhead: Get Ready for Agentforce
• Salesforce Site: Cut Service Costs with Humans and AI Agents on One Platform