Optimize the IT Operations Center

Stop burning budget on non-value-adding activities.

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

The Network Operations Center is not in Kansas anymore.

"The old-school Network Operations Center of the telecom world was heavily peopled and reactionary. Now, the IT Operations Center is about more than network monitoring. An effective Operations Center provides visibility across the entire stack, generates actionable alerts, resolves a host of different incidents, and drives continual improvement in the delivery of high-quality services.
IT’s traditional siloed approach cannot provide the value the business demands. The modern Operations Center breaks down these silos for the end-to-end view required for a service-focused approach."
Derek Shank,
Research Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations
Info-Tech Research Group

Our understanding of the problem

This Research Is Designed For:

• IT Operations Managers
• IT Infrastructure Managers
• CIOs

This Research Will Help You:

• Improve reliability of services.
• Reduce the cost of incident response.
• Reduce the cost of manual repetitive work (MRW).

This Research Will Also Assist

• Business Analysts
• Project Managers
• Business Relationship Managers

This Research Will Help Them

• Develop appropriate non-functional requirements.
• Integrate non-functional requirements into solution design and project implementation.

Executive Summary

Situation

• Your team’s time is burned up by incident response.
• MRW burns up expensive resources.
• You don’t have the visibility to ensure the availability the business demands.

Complication

• The increasing complexity of technology has resulted in siloed teams of specialists.
• The business views IT Operations as a cost center and doesn’t want to provide resources to support improvement initiatives.

Resolution

• Pluck low-hanging fruit for quick wins.
• Obtain buy-in from business stakeholders by speaking their language.
• Clarify lines of accountability and metrics for success.
• Implement targeted initiatives and track key metrics for continual improvement.

Info-Tech Insight

1. Sell the project to the business. Your first job is a sales job because executive sponsorship is key to project success.
2. Worship the holy trinity of metrics: impact of downtime, cost of incident response, and time spent on manual repetitive work (MRW).
3. Invest in order to profit. Improving the Operations Center takes time and money. Expect short-term pain to realize long-term gain.

The role of the Network Operations Center has changed

• The old approach was technology siloed and the Network Operations Center (NOC) only cared about the network.
• The modern Operations Center is about ensuring high availability of end-user services, and requires cross-functional expertise and visibility across all the layers of the technology stack.

Most organizations lack adequate visibility

• The rise of hybrid cloud has made environments more complex, not less.
• The increasing complexity makes monitoring and incident response more difficult than ever.
• Only 31% of organizations use advanced monitoring beyond what is offered by cloud providers.
• 69% perform no monitoring, basic monitoring, or rely entirely on the cloud provider’s monitoring tools.

Siloed service level agreements cannot ensure availability

You can meet high service level agreements (SLAs) for functional silos, but still miss the mark for service availability. The business just wants things to work!

The cost of downtime is massive

Increasing reliance on IT makes downtime hurt more than ever.
98% of enterprises lose $100,000+.
81% of enterprises lose $300,000+ per hour of downtime.

Source: ITIC, 2016

IT is asked to do more with less

Most IT budgets are staying flat or shrinking.

57% of IT departments expect their budget to stay flat or to shrink from 2018 to 2019.

Unify and streamline IT Operations

A well-run Operations Center ensures high availability at reasonable cost. Improving your Operations Center results in:

• Higher availability
• Increased reliability
• Improved project capacity
• Higher business satisfaction

Measure success with the holy trinity of metrics

Focus on reducing downtime, cost of incident response, and MRW.

Start from the top and employ a targeted approach

Analyze data to get buy-in from stakeholders, and use our tools and templates to follow the process for continual improvement in IT Operations.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Optimize the IT Operations Center – project overview

Workshop overview

Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

PHASE 🗲

Pluck Low-Hanging Fruit for Quick Wins

Optimize the IT Operations Center

Conduct a ticket-trend analysis

Generate reports on tickets from your IT service management (ITSM) tool. Look for areas that consume the most resources, such as:

• Recurring tickets.
• Tickets that have taken a long time to resolve.
• Tickets that could have been resolved at a lower tier.
• Tickets that were unnecessarily or improperly escalated.

Identify issues

Analyze the tickets:

• Look for recurring tickets that may indicate underlying problems.
• Ask tier 2 and 3 technicians to flag tickets that could have been resolved at a lower tier.
• Identify painful and/or time consuming service requests.
• Flag any manual repetitive work.

Write the issues on a whiteboard.

Oil & Gas IT reduces manual repetitive maintenance work

CASE STUDY
Industry Oil & Gas
Source Interview

Challenge

The company used a webserver to collect data from field stations for analytics. The server’s version did not clear its cache – it filled up its own memory and would not overwrite, so it would just lock up and have to be rebooted manually.

Solution

The team found out that the volumes and units of data would cause the memory to fill at a certain time of the month. They wrote a script to reboot the machine and set up a planned outage during the appropriate weekend each month.

Results

The team never had to do manual reboots again – though they did have to tweak their reboot script not to rely on their calendar, after a shift in production broke the pattern between memory consumption and the calendar.

Rank the issues

🗲.1.1 10 minutes

1. Assign each participant five sticky dots to use for voting.
2. Have each participant place any number of dots beside the issue(s) of their choice.
3. Count the dots and rank the top three most important issues.

INPUT

• List of issues

OUTPUT

• Top three issues

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers
• Sticky dots

Participants

• Operations Manager
• Infrastructure Manager
• I&O team members