Start with What Is the Deal with AIOps? - Part 1
What to Keep in Mind While Considering AIOps
Unlike some AI initiatives, AIOps doesn't always necessitate the use of a data scientist, so don't let hiring expenses put your AIOps initiatives on hold. It is always nice to have IT team members with AI skills, but this becomes less critical as more intelligent solutions come into prominence that offer AIOps features out of the box, a readily deployable option for IT.
Look for products which have a lot of out of the box features, great adapters to integrate and collaborate with other IT systems, and are easily extensible. If these products have some experience and credibility in the market, that is an added advantage.
Build a Business Case Upfront
AIOps is an emerging technology, and like any other new technologies, many stakeholders may be apprehensive of the benefits, sometimes dragging their feet on engaging. Build a real world business case upfront, and show some value very quickly, which should help take the program forward.
This factor is important while choosing any commercial AIOps product — one should choose a product that has the capability to give hard benefits measurable in hard currencies (along with some cool features obviously) as that would help in getting a business case easily.
Data Availability
At the heart of AIOps is intelligence and that is derived from data, so data availability would help augment the benefits. Though a near-perfect data set is generally a dream, arranging for clean data through system monitoring enhances accuracy and the success of AIOps projects.
Like any other promising new technology, AIOps can fall prey to its own hype
New technology's virtues or vices are often oversold in today's culture, so CIOs need clarity about their goals and what is realistically possible with AI and where in IT AIOps it should be applied.
Change Management
AIOps being new and also transformational in nature, it will naturally have resistance from some sets of users. Socializing the benefits clearly would go a long way in driving adoption.
What Results Should Be Expected from AIOps?
CXOs can bring AIOps into IT for several different benefits.
Business Assurance
Business assurance is where organizations will see the most bang for their buck, as AIOps helps to keep revenue-generating systems up and running and quickly remediating the issues that do come up. Also, by enabling this, IT departments become very relevant to business, thus elevating their image.
IT Agility and Customer Experiences
AIOps also pays off when it is applied to specific problems, like increasing IT agility or creating better customer experiences by creating a unified view of your IT estate, connecting business functions to applications and infrastructure, and improving customer experience by fulfilling their requests quickly and solving their application problems faster.
Better Alignment with Business Goals
AIOps enables the CIO to better align with business needs, as the IT team will be able to proactively take action through automated capabilities and self-heal algorithms to rectify any issues before they can impact a company's operations or revenue-driving business functions. This leaves CIOs with more time to proactively strategize and plan IT initiatives that will support larger business goals.
As a result of AIOps deployment, CIOs will be increasing the team's bandwidth and would be able to reassign IT team members to tasks that help to grow and transform the organization.
Increased Efficiency
Through autonomous operations, a lot of problems get solved and a lot of routine tasks get handled in automated fashion, thus increasing the efficiency of the IT team.
Reenergizing the Task Force
AIOps will also continuously adapt and increase its ability to address more complex problems the longer it has been deployed. This will enable IT to adapt its role and become more of a critical business enabler. Team members will be able to focus on higher-value, interesting work that helps organizations in talent retention and gives them a competitive advantage at the same time.
Traditional IT Operations rely on significant manual efforts that are untenable to scale in today's digitally enabled enterprise. In IT Operations, high efficiency gains, better insights, faster detection (MTTD) and resolution (MTTR) of problems can be expected through well-tuned and well adopted AIOps. Most companies that adopt AIOps report an increase in effectiveness within the business functions.
Those who are considered "high performers" with AI are much likelier to report significantly higher gains. Ultimately, AIOps solutions enable companies to easily deploy "high performing" AI/ML-based solutions to reduce manual efforts and adopt IT changes rapidly with minimal cost.
The organizations that are quickest to adopt AIOps will find themselves better positioned to navigate the ever-evolving move towards digital transformation than their competitors — enabling competitive advantage and the ability to better deliver business outcomes.