How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 2

APMdigest posed the following question to the IT Operations community: How should ITOps adapt to the new normal? In response, industry experts offered their best recommendations for how ITOps can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 2 covers communication and collaboration.

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 1

VIRTUAL TEAM CULTURE

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps leaders should focus on fortifying a virtual team culture that fosters an environment for open communication. In a remote and digital world, it's imperative that teams communicate effectively.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

ONLINE-FIRST CULTURE

Our office culture placed a high value on in-person interactions, so office budgets were targeting an inviting atmosphere. During the overnight change to work-from-home, we worried that we'd lose our office culture, so tried to adapt our in-person office culture to online forums. We held video conferences with an effort to create a facsimile experience — but it turns out it was not possible. The online experience works best where there is one voice at a time. We made a mistake in attempting to adapt our in-person office culture, and it's just not fully reproducible. This mistake led to trial and error, and we realized that we couldn't recapture what we had in-person, so instead had to create a new online-first culture. We are still working on this. So far we found ways to balance communication, using tools like company messaging apps and video conferencing. In ways, we now have better company-wide communication. The communication limit of one voice at a time allowed us to condense information into numerical goals, for instance we have breakout general gathering video conversations for general chats.
Stephen Blum
CTO and Co-Founder, PubNub

TEAM ALIGNMENT

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps and DevOps leaders should onboard a streamlined process that ensures team alignment.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

SET NUMERIC GOALS

We found that focusing on communication using numeric goals and progress towards them helped. Numeric goals are easy to communicate visually (bar graphs) and explain in a short sentence.
Stephen Blum
CTO and Co-Founder, PubNub

PRIORITIZE AND DELEGATE

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps and DevOps leaders should learn how to prioritize and delegate correctly.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

CROSS-ORGANIZATIONAL VISIBILITY

The need for cross-organizational visibility is more critical now than ever before. IT teams can often be siloed — and working from home can make that worse. To find gaps in IT operation hand-offs, track productivity (response to tickets, support workloads by operator, development release cycles, etc.) over time to see if there has been a major change (up or down) in workloads and engagement. Examine your teams' workflows and identify places where tools sprawl might be creating delays due to mental switching costs; streamline through integration and/or aggregating monitoring, change and topology data into a single pane of glass. IT Ops teams will have less competing noise, better understanding of the health of their IT Operations and the right tools to help them.
Assaf Resnick
CEO, BigPanda

ASYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION

Ever since the work-from-home mandates started, ad hoc conversations and resources that were already scattered are often going into a black hole. For many engineers, it's become overwhelming to keep up with all of the communications when working out of the office. To succeed from home, teams need to maintain real-time, aggregated communication streams.
Tina Huang
Founder and CTO, Transposit

High stakes and urgent (synchronous) communication are especially challenging during Covid. I vote that teams invest in automation and monitoring that enables employees to move fast — coordinating asynchronously and with guardrails built in — yet recover quickly when things go wrong.
Mohit Tiwari
CEO and Co-Founder, Symmetry Systems

MAINTAIN FEEDBACK LOOP

Knowing that feedback is a key element to the culture of your ITOps teams, it is critical to address the lack of in-person feedback in a remote culture. Creating several, smaller touch points is critical to keeping this feedback loop going without creating more arduous meetings.
Collin Mariner
Analyst, Gigaom

OFFICE HOURS

We have seen success by scheduling 30 minutes near the end of each day for what we call office hours. We publish our office hours to the entire organization and encourage anyone to join. This allows us to be available to the organization for asks that typically come in person, as well as receive more real-time feedback.
Collin Mariner
Analyst, Gigaom

MAKE A CONNECTION

The most prepared IT leaders will develop new programs for engaging staff that may feel disconnected.
Sean McDermott
CEO, Windward Consulting Group

Listen to the AI+ITOPS Podcast with special guest Sean McDermott

Read Windward Consulting's New Report: 2020 COVID-19 IT Economic Impact Study

COLLABORATION TOOLS

As remote work has become a mainstay of doing business, ITOps should work with their company's CTO and CSO to offer the right mix of collaboration tools for employees. Remote work will continue to add stress for employees, and it's the company's job to provide a framework of respect for the home situations of their employees and the tools/resources they need to be successful, such as video conferencing platforms, Google Drive, and notification systems. ITOps teams should regularly evaluate the performance of their organization's communication and collaboration tools to ensure employees can maintain their productivity levels while working remotely.
Marc Linster
CTO, EDB

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, few enterprises had made the leap forward to remote working. When the pandemic hit, many companies transitioned to a fully remote work environment, accelerating the trend many years ahead in a matter of months. ITOps suddenly needed to fight an uphill battle, supporting a remote workforce of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. Setting up the proper infrastructure, in terms of tools and processes, is the number one priority, ensuring that in the short term the company survives and long term that it thrives. New tools must be procured, which inherently are built to support remote collaboration, particularly for mission critical roles such as SREs.
Odysseas Lamtzidis
Developer Relations, Netdata

Go to: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 3

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One of the earliest lessons I learned from architecting throughput-heavy services is that simplicity wins repeatedly: fewer moving parts, loosely coupled execution (fewer synchronous calls), and precise timing metering. You want data and decisions to travel the shortest possible path. The goal is to build a system where every strategy and each line of code (contention is the key metric) complements the decision trees ...

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How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 2

APMdigest posed the following question to the IT Operations community: How should ITOps adapt to the new normal? In response, industry experts offered their best recommendations for how ITOps can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 2 covers communication and collaboration.

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 1

VIRTUAL TEAM CULTURE

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps leaders should focus on fortifying a virtual team culture that fosters an environment for open communication. In a remote and digital world, it's imperative that teams communicate effectively.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

ONLINE-FIRST CULTURE

Our office culture placed a high value on in-person interactions, so office budgets were targeting an inviting atmosphere. During the overnight change to work-from-home, we worried that we'd lose our office culture, so tried to adapt our in-person office culture to online forums. We held video conferences with an effort to create a facsimile experience — but it turns out it was not possible. The online experience works best where there is one voice at a time. We made a mistake in attempting to adapt our in-person office culture, and it's just not fully reproducible. This mistake led to trial and error, and we realized that we couldn't recapture what we had in-person, so instead had to create a new online-first culture. We are still working on this. So far we found ways to balance communication, using tools like company messaging apps and video conferencing. In ways, we now have better company-wide communication. The communication limit of one voice at a time allowed us to condense information into numerical goals, for instance we have breakout general gathering video conversations for general chats.
Stephen Blum
CTO and Co-Founder, PubNub

TEAM ALIGNMENT

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps and DevOps leaders should onboard a streamlined process that ensures team alignment.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

SET NUMERIC GOALS

We found that focusing on communication using numeric goals and progress towards them helped. Numeric goals are easy to communicate visually (bar graphs) and explain in a short sentence.
Stephen Blum
CTO and Co-Founder, PubNub

PRIORITIZE AND DELEGATE

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps and DevOps leaders should learn how to prioritize and delegate correctly.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

CROSS-ORGANIZATIONAL VISIBILITY

The need for cross-organizational visibility is more critical now than ever before. IT teams can often be siloed — and working from home can make that worse. To find gaps in IT operation hand-offs, track productivity (response to tickets, support workloads by operator, development release cycles, etc.) over time to see if there has been a major change (up or down) in workloads and engagement. Examine your teams' workflows and identify places where tools sprawl might be creating delays due to mental switching costs; streamline through integration and/or aggregating monitoring, change and topology data into a single pane of glass. IT Ops teams will have less competing noise, better understanding of the health of their IT Operations and the right tools to help them.
Assaf Resnick
CEO, BigPanda

ASYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION

Ever since the work-from-home mandates started, ad hoc conversations and resources that were already scattered are often going into a black hole. For many engineers, it's become overwhelming to keep up with all of the communications when working out of the office. To succeed from home, teams need to maintain real-time, aggregated communication streams.
Tina Huang
Founder and CTO, Transposit

High stakes and urgent (synchronous) communication are especially challenging during Covid. I vote that teams invest in automation and monitoring that enables employees to move fast — coordinating asynchronously and with guardrails built in — yet recover quickly when things go wrong.
Mohit Tiwari
CEO and Co-Founder, Symmetry Systems

MAINTAIN FEEDBACK LOOP

Knowing that feedback is a key element to the culture of your ITOps teams, it is critical to address the lack of in-person feedback in a remote culture. Creating several, smaller touch points is critical to keeping this feedback loop going without creating more arduous meetings.
Collin Mariner
Analyst, Gigaom

OFFICE HOURS

We have seen success by scheduling 30 minutes near the end of each day for what we call office hours. We publish our office hours to the entire organization and encourage anyone to join. This allows us to be available to the organization for asks that typically come in person, as well as receive more real-time feedback.
Collin Mariner
Analyst, Gigaom

MAKE A CONNECTION

The most prepared IT leaders will develop new programs for engaging staff that may feel disconnected.
Sean McDermott
CEO, Windward Consulting Group

Listen to the AI+ITOPS Podcast with special guest Sean McDermott

Read Windward Consulting's New Report: 2020 COVID-19 IT Economic Impact Study

COLLABORATION TOOLS

As remote work has become a mainstay of doing business, ITOps should work with their company's CTO and CSO to offer the right mix of collaboration tools for employees. Remote work will continue to add stress for employees, and it's the company's job to provide a framework of respect for the home situations of their employees and the tools/resources they need to be successful, such as video conferencing platforms, Google Drive, and notification systems. ITOps teams should regularly evaluate the performance of their organization's communication and collaboration tools to ensure employees can maintain their productivity levels while working remotely.
Marc Linster
CTO, EDB

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, few enterprises had made the leap forward to remote working. When the pandemic hit, many companies transitioned to a fully remote work environment, accelerating the trend many years ahead in a matter of months. ITOps suddenly needed to fight an uphill battle, supporting a remote workforce of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. Setting up the proper infrastructure, in terms of tools and processes, is the number one priority, ensuring that in the short term the company survives and long term that it thrives. New tools must be procured, which inherently are built to support remote collaboration, particularly for mission critical roles such as SREs.
Odysseas Lamtzidis
Developer Relations, Netdata

Go to: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 3

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

OpenTelemetry: A Complete Telemetry Framework that Grows with You

Most organizations approach OpenTelemetry as a collection of individual tools they need to assemble from scratch. This view misses the bigger picture. OpenTelemetry is a complete telemetry framework with composable components that address specific problems at different stages of organizational maturity. You start with what you need today and adopt additional pieces as your observability practices evolve ...

The Quiet Power of Milliseconds in High Traffic Systems

One of the earliest lessons I learned from architecting throughput-heavy services is that simplicity wins repeatedly: fewer moving parts, loosely coupled execution (fewer synchronous calls), and precise timing metering. You want data and decisions to travel the shortest possible path. The goal is to build a system where every strategy and each line of code (contention is the key metric) complements the decision trees ...

Are AI "Autonomous Coworkers" Ready for Payroll?

As discussions around AI "autonomous coworkers" accelerate, many industry projections assume that agents will soon operate alongside human staff in making decisions, taking actions, and managing tasks with minimal oversight. But a growing number of critics (including some of the developers building these systems) argue that the industry still has a long way to go to be able to treat AI agents like fully trusted teammates ...

Enterprise AI Reaches Pivotal Inflection Point: From Automation to Agentic Intelligence

Enterprise AI has entered a transformational phase where, according to Digitate's recently released survey, Agentic AI and the Future of Enterprise IT, companies are moving beyond traditional automation toward Agentic AI systems designed to reason, adapt, and collaborate alongside human teams ...

The Real Reason Enterprise AI Stalls: It Doesn't Fit in the Box

The numbers back this urgency up. A recent Zapier survey shows that 92% of enterprises now treat AI as a top priority. Leaders want it, and teams are clamoring for it. But if you look closer at the operations of these companies, you see a different picture. The rollout is slow. The results are often delayed. There's a disconnect between what leaders want and what their technical infrastructure can handle ...

AI's Inflection Point Will Redefine Enterprise Readiness in 2026

Kyndryl's 2025 Readiness Report revealed that 61% of global business and technology leaders report increasing pressure from boards and regulators to prove AI's ROI. As the technology evolves and expectations continue to rise, leaders are compelled to generate and prove impact before scaling further. This will lead to a decisive turning point in 2026 ...

Turning Foresight into Resilience: Reclaiming Prevention in the Age of Exposure

Cloudflare's disruption illustrates how quickly a single provider's issue cascades into widespread exposure. Many organizations don't fully realize how tightly their systems are coupled to thirdparty services, or how quickly availability and security concerns align when those services falter ... You can't avoid these dependencies, but you can understand them ...

MLOps Meets DataOps: Creating Unified Backbone for AI

If you work with AI, you know this story. A model performs during testing, looks great in early reviews, works perfectly in production and then slowly loses relevance after operating for a while. Everything on the surface looks perfect — pipelines are running, predictions or recommendations are error-free, data quality checks show green; yet outcomes don't meet the ground reality. This pattern often repeats across enterprise AI programs. Take for example, a mid-sized retail banking and wealth-management firm with heavy investments in AI-powered risk analytics, fraud detection and personalized credit-decisioning systems. The model worked well for a while, but transactions increased, so did false positives by 18% ...

2026 Network Monitoring Trends

Basic uptime is no longer the gold standard. By 2026, network monitoring must do more than report status, it must explain performance in a hybrid-first world. Networks are no longer just static support systems; they are agile, distributed architectures that sit at the very heart of the customer experience and the business outcomes ... The following five trends represent the new standard for network health, providing a blueprint for teams to move from reactive troubleshooting to a proactive, integrated future ...

2026 AI Predictions - Part 5

APMdigest's Predictions Series concludes with 2026 AI Predictions — industry experts offer predictions on how AI and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2026. Part 5, the final installment, covers AI's impacts on IT teams ...