As wonderful as getting access to SaaS and cloud services at the touch of a button is, it brings a level of complexity that we’ve never seen before in IT, as well as a level of customer expectation of instant, great quality digital services. Yet, our IT Operations still look the same – we manage in the same way we managed legacy systems that were physical many years ago. The consequence of this, is disillusioned users, lack of customer trust and ultimately, lost revenue, as well as cost that only goes upwards.
I’ve met with hundreds of IT executives over the years and they all say the same thing – Our world of IT is becoming more complex by the day – Cloud, containers, serverless, you name it, are really useful to us in transforming our businesses and helping them stay competitive. Everyone needs to spin up new services quicker than ever, the demand from the business is unparalleled, with some organizations making 30,000 changes to their technology estate every week. But when I ask IT executives their big headaches, it’s the same – I’m struggling to keep the services operational to the manner our users expect, and it’s costing me too much money to do so.
So, where do we start looking to solve this problem? First step, let’s use the incident data which we have in our ITSM tool. Sit down with 6 months of data and run some pivot tables … ask some questions like, how often does an incident get re-assigned, how many incidents do we understand which business service they’re related too, which CI’s cause us the most problems, what does our average MTTR (Mean time to resolution) look like, and how much does an incident cost us to resolve (just the operational costs)? This will give you some really good clues as to where to start fixing your issues.
The reality is, though most of us have pretty efficient ITSM processes these days, our IT Operations teams need great data being fed into those tools so that they can do their job. Their job was hard enough when we went from physical to virtual, let alone when things are now outside of our datacenter’s and might only exist for a few minutes. We need to focus on getting them great data first, then we can look at automating second.
So, study your ITSM data – You’ll find some surprising things that might not look nice, but are typical. I worked with a very well respected bank – when I studied their incidents, their average MTTR for P1/P2 incidents was 39 hours!! When I looked at a global insurer, they only got an incident to the right resolver group first time 42% of the time! Every single ITSM extract I looked at had huge gaps in assigning the correct business service to the incident, therefore were never prioritised correctly, and the number of incidents that have no CI assigned to them is still unbelievable.
This data, or lack of it – and don’t feel bad, everyone’s in the same boat – will start to help you paint a picture of what you need to address in your data gaps.
Another key challenge is how do you get funding to invest in plugging the data gap, so your people can improve the service? Well the answer is two fold, with executive buy in, followed by automation.
Executive buy in starts with bringing a senior non-IT exec to the conversation. Bring them to a meeting of your ITSM, NOC & Operations managers – Ask them to spell out the vision for the company for the next 2 years. What does your organization need to move the needle on? Typically this is an increase in revenue, whilst improving profits by decreasing costs.
Then look at how IT is measured – what would make a difference to these key exec KPI’s? For example, if it took ten minutes to fix an incident, not one hour – would that mean less customer churn, meaning an increase in revenue? If you had the right data in IT, could you start to automate daily tasks, such as every L1 operator spending the first 10 minute of each call figuring out the CI and affected service, or 15 minutes of every incident with an L2/3 engineer gathering the top 10 busiest running processes, or running OSPF queries? If so, would you therefore not need to hire additional staff, or replace those who have taken up the great resignation – in which case, you’re directly affecting the profitability of the business and moving a needle for your executive team.
So to conclude – If you want your business to take advantage of cloud & services that will propel your business to new heights and beat your competition, then take these steps:
- Interrogate your ITSM data to see where your gaps are, so you can give your IT Ops teams a fighting chance of providing a great service
- Get executive alignment – What is the business needing to achieve that you can align your IT goals against to get funding to plug those data gaps
- Plug your data gaps to help your team provide a better service, which helps keep your customers happy, reduce churn and have a positive impact on revenue
- Use the good data you get to automate wherever possible, the repeatable tasks people do, so that you need less people in IT op’s, helping drive profitability
I’ve been lucky enough to help many businesses with this over the years. The ones that grab this with both hands drive much better customer satisfaction by driving MTTR down to sub ten minutes on average and driving incident reduction by 40%+, helping keeping their clients happy and having a positive revenue impact – They also drive much better cost efficiency in IT Operations, with typically 41% less resource in L1/L2 support, driving profitability for the business. So you can get the results your business needs, even in the complex hybrid cloud world … follow these steps and enjoy your success as a world class IT Operations team!
