One Body, Many Parts: Bridging Your Organization's Business Service Gap
February 21, 2014

Bob Johnson
Optanix

Share this

Just as a body is a single unit comprised of many different and unique parts, which – though different – all work towards the achievement of a single end, that is, the well-being of the body, so too are modern organizations comprised of many constituent units that are interdependent and connected and yet behave somewhat autonomously within the overall organizational ecosystem.

And just as with a body, it is imperative that the many parts operate in unison with each other to ensure optimal health and function, so too is it imperative that the various constituent elements in an organization are aligned and cooperate in an accord to achieve optimal performance.

One common source of organizational disconnect, which disrupts the performance of the whole, is the fundamental challenge in bridging the gap between IT Operations and the business itself. IT Operations oftentimes exists in a silo, segregated from the rest of the organization, believed to be working behind the scenes to keep the customer and employee facing services online and accessible.

It is easy for IT to operate in a vacuum in most organizations because they have little (if any) input on what would traditionally be considered the core business. There's an often-employed expression in (American) football that is along these lines: if you don't hear the name of an offensive lineman during the game, it's a good thing: it means he's doing his job. And in many cases, IT Operations is viewed similarly. While they're – in reality – involved in all phases, ensuring availability of critical business services, we're generally only cognizant of their presence if something has gone wrong and needs to be fixed.

One natural consequence of this segregation is that IT Ops does not generally have a business-centric view of the world. Their epistemological framework is all nuts and bolts, servers and applications, switches, routers and firewalls. They're not necessarily attuned to how core IT components ultimately resolve to critical business services that employees and customers depend upon. In short: there's a substantive and natural gap between IT Ops and the business itself, and this gap will inevitably manifest itself in outages or other negative consequences if it is not bridged.

So that's the problem. Then what's a step towards the solution? A discovery and mapping system that translates the "nuts and bolts" into a business service-centric and top-down view of the organization. With such a system, IT Ops would also be in a better position to perform its change impact analyses in support of the overall organizational ecosystem.

There is little doubt that a change impact analysis can be of great value to your organization in improving business service quality, and facilitating more efficient IT operations. The decision is really in choosing the right discovery and mapping system that would get the job done more quickly and accurately while making your life easier.

In short: many parts behaving as one body, will promote harmony and efficiency within your organization.

Bob Johnson is CMO at Neebula.

Share this

The Latest

March 27, 2024

Nearly all (99%) globa IT decision makers, regardless of region or industry, recognize generative AI's (GenAI) transformative potential to influence change within their organizations, according to The Elastic Generative AI Report ...

March 27, 2024

Agent-based approaches to real user monitoring (RUM) simply do not work. If you are pitched to install an "agent" in your mobile or web environments, you should run for the hills ...

March 26, 2024

The world is now all about end-users. This paradigm of focusing on the end-user was simply not true a few years ago, as backend metrics generally revolved around uptime, SLAs, latency, and the like. DevOps teams always pitched and presented the metrics they thought were the most correlated to the end-user experience. But let's be blunt: Unless there was an egregious fire, the correlated metrics were super loose or entirely false ...

March 25, 2024

This year, New Relic published the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance Report to share insights derived from the 2023 Observability Forecast on the adoption and business value of observability across the financial services industry (FSI) and insurance sectors. Here are seven key takeaways from the report ...

March 22, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 2, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and AIOps ...

March 21, 2024

In the course of EMA research over the last twelve years, the message for IT organizations looking to pursue a forward path in AIOps adoption is overall a strongly positive one. The benefits achieved are growing in diversity and value ...

March 20, 2024

Today, as enterprises transcend into a new era of work, surpassing the revolution, they must shift their focus and strategies to thrive in this environment. Here are five key areas that organizations should prioritize to strengthen their foundation and steer themselves through the ever-changing digital world ...

March 19, 2024

If there's one thing we should tame in today's data-driven marketing landscape, this would be data debt, a silent menace threatening to undermine all the trust you've put in the data-driven decisions that guide your strategies. This blog aims to explore the true costs of data debt in marketing operations, offering four actionable strategies to mitigate them through enhanced marketing observability ...

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...