Generally, the IT clients think that requesting IT services, specially which requires network changes, takes about 3 to 6 months to deliver. The typical process model is,

1. IT Clients and IT groups conduct various discovery meetings, goes from many weeks to months.
2. IT group start a mini-project to track the request to delivery.
3. IT Clients are either updated through meetings or otherwise don’t see visibility on progress except target delivery date.
4. In some cases, the steps from '1' to '3' goes through multiple iterations as requirement changes.
5. There is limited way to track transparently what was requested vs what is implemented on network.

All this is even true for cases when IT groups can offer some of these engagement-requests as a standard service and do not need to even go through this long back-n-forth engagement process. IT groups can offer self-service experience to IT clients for standard services and save months in lost opportunity & operational cost. For example,

• Activate/deactivate company partners to connect with company’s corporate network
• Add/Update voice, video, data services to office (branch, remote, sales, campus offices)
• Add/Update/Delete extranet partners access to apps running in private data centers
• Enable hybrid-cloud model for Apps team to seamlessly & securely connect with public-clouds
• Change QoS (quality of service) on existing office setup
• Change WAN connectivity providers based on service quality SLAs
• Many more…