Industry observers, as we know, have long complained about IT management. They predict that silos of high-tech advantages, pointless discussion meetings, and poorly performing applications will hinder troubleshooting and escalate user complaints. While IT operations managers want to focus on improving services for end users or customers, technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing, and mobility have forced them to adopt service assurance strategies more quickly.
With over 35 years of experience as an IT management software and solutions expert, CA Technologies proposes the following five simple steps to free IT managers from their troubles, enable efficient IT management operations, optimize application performance, and ultimately satisfy end users and customers.
1. Shift Mindset to Advance IT
Most IT initiatives involve a mental shift or cultural transformation at the outset. For most IT organizations, previous achievements were measured by statistics like server response time or network uptime, depending on the domain. In today’s dynamic environment, the end-user experience (whether for internal or external customers) and the IT services delivered are the new measures of success. This means IT must not only monitor the individual components that make up an overall service, as they did in the past, but also focus on how those components support the service and how the service meets customer needs.
2. Integrate Existing IT Tools
The next step is to integrate perspectives from the service management lifecycle and monitoring tools. Integrating previously siloed tools and aligning them to serve service objectives will be a significant technical challenge. Furthermore, once an IT organization makes this decision, not all tools can easily transition to a service assurance model.
Businesses need more than a dashboard with red and green indicator lights to point out whether a problem exists. IT operations need to identify services and model them in such a way that any changes to the underlying applications and infrastructure components supporting a service are automatically updated in near real-time. This ensures that operations can more easily trace the source or locate the problem, thereby reducing downtime and improving the end-user experience and bottom-line results.
3. Prioritize Remediation Efforts
Once an organization understands who a problem affects and how it impacts them, it can begin searching for solutions. A customer might be willing to wait a moment while updating their contact information, but making them wait the same amount of time during the login process is enough to send them straight to another provider. The ultimate goal for IT is to link the end-user transaction experience with business outcomes.
4. Use Resources Wisely
At the same time, an effective service assurance model allows organizations to view and plan transactions more effectively, leading to a better understanding of IT and business demands. Subsequently, organizations can allocate resources—including hardware, bandwidth, and network capacity—to applications in the optimal mix, rather than over- or under-provisioning them.
A good case study is an international food manufacturing company that has integrated service assurance into its global operations. The company aims to double its growth every seven years, thus requiring better control over various regional performances, from transaction activities to network performance. Its IT team leader stated: “Obviously, we don’t want to over-purchase capacity, infrastructure, and bandwidth that we don’t need. Our goal is to be able to forecast capacity and make predictive purchases, so we are not too late in adding this system.”
5. Continuously Adjust
Adopting service assurance measures for IT management is not a one-time IT project. It is an ongoing process that delivers incremental benefits, and IT operations managers must decide where they want to start. If the desired end result is improving the end-user experience, the IT department must define exactly what that means for its organization.
Therefore, once change occurs, IT organizations can begin to consider metrics such as “How much money will we lose if we change the infrastructure?” or “How does this operation risk our service level agreement (SLA) compliance?” Nowadays, it is far too easy for customers to switch to different services from other providers, so IT must identify the metrics that most deeply impact their business and ensure that their operational and reputational risks are minimized.
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