A lot has changed with the enterprise architecture over the last 25 years along with the tooling and methods used for monitoring and reporting on business performance. Today we are tracking IT services and workloads that run across cloud-based applications, converged/hybrid infrastructure, and resources coming and going. Now bring AI into the mix and it has never been so challenging for the enterprise.
The complexities have only increased with the addition of AI, unique devices, edge computing, and having shared virtual systems across global sites. With the migration to the cloud and newly added AI, visibility is suffering (along with accountability) across the enterprise which makes it harder to isolate at risk conditions, root-cause issues, and business impacting problems. With the added skills gap and the talent drain, how can you possibly manage? Accountability and transparency become the focus.
There is ]automated capabilities that are available today that helps organizations become better at planning, predicting, and preventing things that impact the business. The enterprise still struggles however to improve things like operational response, change management, and proactive collaboration. The demands on corporate culture will continue to grow and these new approaches will require new ways to interact with our business partners, customers, and stakeholders.
Today, IT and Operations is either becoming a larger part of the business or being outsourced. Regardless of where it is, the operational state continues to deteriorate and underperform when it comes to handling (and preventing incidents). The impact of this is often felt at the business layer though the lack of visibility with decision making, company reputation, and operational costs.
The truth is that organizations have been hitting the repeat button over and over again with only slightly different results each time. They select new tools that are supposed to simply complexity, but end up providing the same result each time; or only add additional layers of complexity. It’s not easy to turn the big ship, but if you have the right “approach”, it can be done naturally without force and at a very accelerated pace.
The challenges will continue and the forecast for IT Service Management will remain weak for organizations that are not willing to look at new approaches to solving problems.
To help guide the efforts, the team at CirrusPoint has provided a few points below to assist those who are looking to transform and improve culture and collaboration with in a better approach.
The CirrusPoint Approach isn’t based on product or services alone, but on decades of experiences helping clients reach their goals and can be considered essential for enabling success. Hopefully this post provide some valuable insight and don’t hesitate to contact CirrusPoint if you would like to explore our approach and enterprise solutions further.
Be Smart about AI
There’s so much talk about “AI” but what the heck does it really mean, especially for IT and Operations? AI can be used in IT Service Management for things like reducing operational costs and improving operational service and incident repair times.
For CirrusPoint, AI is the “Automated Intelligence” that’s needed to pinpoint a root-cause problem among the many symptoms reported. AI helps isolate anomalies in performance trends and enables organizations to be more proactive. AI is also used for running self-healing actions for automatically fixing problems and then providing proactive notifications. Even more so, it’s about being able to spot and “sense” situations that are actively brewing up and provide early warning so we can get ahead of failures. There are many aspects of AI, but how you select and apply it depends on whether your organization is really willing to be innovative and move past the reactive processes of the past. There is tremendous value in using AI to improve the operational state and the quality of the service provided to customers.
One way for a “quick-win” with AI is to apply it to enterprise monitoring and event management. Doing so allows you to automate the detection of root-cause events and correlate/differentiate problems from symptoms. If your organization is still writing rules or matching events for network management then your most likely behind on the innovation curve. Writing rules and matching events is a thing of the past and should be replaced with more automated approaches that are supported by discovery and analysis. Reduce your MTTR – don’t increase it.
Orchestration goes beyond just collecting and manipulating data
Just think about how many tools and screens people to look at each day. Where exactly is the starting point for solving problems? How do you centrally correlate all the many sources of data, quickly? What is the common real-time source of truth across the organization?
These are all questions that need to be answered with due diligence. Integration solves some of the challenges however we must integrate appropriately and orchestrate data in the right direction so we can increase the range-of-use for information and reporting. Organizations need to have a complete picture of what the business of IT looks like and how data should be used.
Orchestration goes beyond collecting and consolidating or just sticking all your events to a ticketing system. It involves things like auto-discovery, automated analysis, and self-service reporting. These are the things that can help improve operational effectiveness and start to dissolve the reactive mode that exists widely today.
It’s really about prevention
With all the new complexities being introduced, it will be difficult to “prevent” if we continue to work in isolated silos and align staff by product vendors or technology capability. Orchestration is not only about bringing data, tools, and event sources together – it’s about bringing people together in real-time to share common perspective on how they operate and prevent, and how they depend on each other for service assurance.
Lighten up on the ticketing system infatuation
There’s a lot of excitement since moving ITSM to the cloud, however the ticketing system is a reactive system and it will always be since it is used primarily after issues have already occurred. If the ticketing system is viewed as the holy grail for centralization, then organizational teams will continue to be in reactive mode waiting for the next thing to break instead of preventing it from breaking. Too often, the central allure of a CMDB, data lake, or the cool ITOM platform feels promising, however achieving success and establishing any sort of prevention-focused behavior will require an intelligent and real-time source of reporting that the ticketing system cannot provide.
Find Some Business Meaning
We talk a lot about connecting IT with the business, but what does that really mean? Where does the business go to understand the current status of IT and the impact on business? We need to view IT based on the business services being consumed and supported. Most of the sources currently used for ITSM reporting lack any real business meaning to allow executive leaders to plan and assess risk or impact. Ensuring future and lasting success will require the ability to bring logical assets/entities together for reporting.
The security and monitoring tools used today spit out tons of costly machine data, but what does it mean to the business, and how does it impact the operational state?
Organization need to focus on how to logically align data, assets, and transactions in their environment so they can get ahead of issues and customer impact. Using analytics more efficiently to assess the active business impact will help make better real-time decisions. Correlating business logic also helps operations get out of the mode of fixing things that may have no real impact. Also, it becomes easier to prioritize when IT knows who might be impacted. There’s lots to be gained by knowing what part of the business is impacted and what resource(s) to engage with incident remediation. The many costly all-hands calls can be avoided.
A final thought…
Regardless of whether assets are on-prem or in the cloud, corporate leadership must commit to having a transparency over IT that everyone can access. Moving forward requires executive innovators and an organizational leader to drive and sponsor innovation.
Best of luck with your transformation! The future looks bright!
For further information feel free to contact CirrusPoint by email (solutions@cirruspoint.com) or by phone +1 800-403-6596.
Finding success in the future will require executive innovators who are decisive and able to step up and embrace new solutions, capabilities, and approaches that will help grow their business and offer protection over corporate roles (in the form of “results”).
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