Five best practices for modernizing IT operations
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Improving employee experience is the bedrock of modern IT service management initiatives.
Managing day-to-day technology operations and user needs has become more and more challenging, compelling technology to modernize its delivery of services. With a new urgency for modernization after the Covid 19 pandemic and other economic and societal changes, IT leaders are in the race to adopt new technologies to enable resource realignment and improve the employee experience.
The latest report from The Hackett Group on The Future of IT Service Management reveals that IT leaders must modernize their IT service management (ITSM) capabilities by introducing intelligent automation enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) analysis of process data and AI for technology operations (AIOps).
But here’s the catch. Adopting new tools or AIOps platforms without first rethinking the foundation will exacerbate existing problems.
That’s why we’ve put together a list of best practices to help IT leaders, such as yourselves, to make the right moves when modernizing your IT operations. Take a look at the following measures to create a new magnitude of technology function efficiency to enable resource realignment and an improved employee experience.
The new Hackett report talks about the foundations and targeted outcomes for future ITSM. The report also highlights some best practices for IT leaders moving toward modernizing their IT operations and exploring the opportunities of AIOps. You can get a copy of the report here.
Five best practices for modernizing IT operations
1. Make the business case
IT leaders modernizing IT operations say there’s a clear return on investment (ROI), such as lower operating costs and better service. Evaluating and implementing AIOps will take a backseat to other business priorities unless IT leaders understand, and can sell, the benefits to the business.
2. Bring in expertise
The application of AIOps will be new to most IT support organizations, so seeking external expertise is critical early on to orient the transformation. For instance, a proper AIOps solution should be able to support all possible telemetry information the enterprise collects—logs, metrics, traces, and events. It should be able to handle both structured and unstructured data.
3. Know where you’re going
The IT organization must have a three to five-year roadmap that factors in ITSM modernization and AIOps initiatives. It’s also wise to ensure that new algorithms and processes are tool-agnostic and can run on any platform.
4. Ask for POCs
Vendors can often make a more compelling case by showing rather than telling, so give them the data to demonstrate what is possible. “You can move beyond theory really quickly that way,” said Todd Renaud, SVP and CIO of Southeastern Grocers, who has done this in the application performance management realm.
5. Rethink talent
IT leaders considering modernizing ITSM will need to staff differently to support the implementation of AIOps. Critical to the transformation will be staff members with a systemic understanding of applications and infrastructure, process expertise, experience or interest in ML and statistical pattern analysis, in-depth knowledge of business functions or processes, and a desire to make changes to optimize operations will be critical to the transformation.
Download the Hackett report today for more in-depth information on the foundations and targeted outcomes for future ITSM.
