“People” play an immensely powerful role in IT operations management, while also serving as the link connecting tools and processes. As enterprise IT systems continuously expand, people with different responsibilities will focus on different aspects within this value chain. So, as the enterprise relentlessly pursues higher growth targets, how can an IT operations management platform be leveraged to support IT operations engineers, IT department managers, and corporate decision-makers, providing them with the most valuable information and resolving troubles?
Three Core Roles Focusing on IT Operations as Enterprise Scale Expands
Generally, the requirements for IT operations management gradually adjust with the enterprise’s scale and growth speed. Analyzing from both technical and managerial dimensions, enterprise IT operations management can typically be divided into: the IT infrastructure management stage, the integrated business service management stage, and the domain-wide centralized management stage. Across these three different stages, as the enterprise grows from small to large and IT systems evolve from simple to complex, the personnel focusing on IT operations management also increase in number and rise in seniority. From a lone administrator maintaining terminals and networks, to an IT operations team leader coordinating with business departments, and then to high-level decision analysts represented by the CIO, these three core roles eventually coexist within IT operations management. Because these individuals play different roles and assume different responsibilities within the enterprise, their focus points regarding IT operations management also differ.
Take an IT failure in a large enterprise with branch offices as an example. Due to the different scopes of responsibilities among these three levels of managers, their perspectives on this IT failure will also differ: frontline IT operations personnel worry about not receiving failure notifications immediately and the difficulty of locating the failure source exacerbates the situation after falling into a passive position; if the network administrator’s pressure is only vertical, the IT manager caught in the middle bears pressure from all sides, including top-down commands from the CIO and horizontal urging from business departments. Naturally, they will be more concerned about the scope of business impact this failure might cause or look for alternative solutions that can be implemented; Usually, in outsiders’ eyes, IT failures seem less important at the decision-making level, but this entirely depends on whether the enterprise’s key business is built upon the network foundation. If an incident like “Royal Bank of Scotland pays hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation due to IT failures” occurs, the CIO cannot afford the consequences. Therefore, what the decision-making layer wants to see is not the superficial appearance of failures or IT operational status, but broader, deeper data, i.e., strategic evidence.
As a leading domestic IT operations management expert, Betasoft believes: “After years of informatization construction and data accumulation, enterprises have gradually entered the era of great centralization, and the ‘small front-end, large back-end’ model makes IT operations management increasingly important. The vastness and complexity of the IT backend not only makes the judgment and recovery time after an IT system failure more urgent but also means a single move may affect the whole system. Therefore, enterprises must first provide support for the corresponding personnel based on their current IT operations management stage, and implement IT management methods that complement each other in line with the enterprise’s growth pace. Secondly, they must possess a strategic vision to ultimately provide a global management platform for these three core roles.”
No Longer “Led by Failures,” IT Will Be More Capable of Innovation
No matter which stage an enterprise’s IT operations management is in, if IT personnel are busy rushing around dealing with endless failures, troubleshooting day after day, and configuring machines, this will prevent the enterprise from believing in IT’s innovative capabilities. Furthermore, the IT department will have little time to research strategies or make long-term plans, both of which are indispensable for IT innovation. Therefore, the sooner the troubles of IT failure management are resolved, the greater the reserve of innovative capability will be later on, which is equally meaningful for maintaining business innovation within the enterprise.
In the IT infrastructure management stage, users can use Betasoft’s BTNM and BTIM to monitor and manage network systems, network devices, servers, etc., forming proactive management and automatically locating failure sources, thus freeing frontline IT operations personnel. Afterwards, in the integrated business service management stage, BSM can be introduced. Using BTIM, from a business perspective, the networks, servers, and base software associated with the business can be clearly planned in a business view at a glance, shifting the focus of IT managers and the entire department from IT failure management to ensuring the health of the entire business system. In the domain-wide centralized management stage, users can further utilize Betasoft BTCM to perform 360-degree comprehensive processing, statistics, analysis, and mining of domain-wide IT operations data, then present the final results in different interfaces tailored for the three core roles. Here, Betasoft BTCM is primarily an IT operations platform with a larger