Shifting to Analytics Driven Management for IT Operations
September 22, 2011
Sasha Gilenson
Share this

Today’s market environment demands businesses to change and adapt rapidly according to market dynamics, while still remaining in control. For business, these dynamics can mean sifting through what can amount to petabytes of data to act tactically and strategically.

Business Intelligence (BI) analytics tools help companies catch what could have been missed opportunities, using robust infrastructure to sift through mountains of data, and applying intelligent analytics. This way, business can identify hidden trends, customer relationships, buying behavior, operational and financial patterns, business opportunities and other vital information allowing business to take part in the market proactively.

Through BSM initiatives, IT is charged with supporting the changing demands of business, maintaining availability and ensuring that performance remains high. Similar to the business side experience, the IT landscape has grown in complexity, supporting a wider and growing range of technologies and platforms (Virtualization, Cloud, Open Source etc.), and accelerated application release schedules. This now means IT faces near-overwhelming quantities of information.

So while business progresses via BI, adopting analytics for management decisions, ironically the organization supporting this infrastructure, IT Operations, has adhered to an older, static-process driven paradigm. By not applying the analytics-based approach (like business) for their own operations, IT jeopardizes system stability, ultimately exposing business to the risk of devastating consequences.

Mountains of Data

Mountains of dynamic information confront IT. One of the prominent areas is in the cloud scenario. Self-service provisioning has multiplied the amount of activities occurring outside of static processes. The new provisioning opportunities are beyond IT management, leaving IT with limited visibility to what happens there. For example, an organization sets up a private cloud with a dynamic management system, allowing self-service provisioning of servers for the testing team. Traditionally, testing professionals would have come to IT and request an environment, and IT would oversee and manage this entire process. Now the process is independent, when testing needs an environment, they just create it.

Today’s Approach: Static Processes Drive IT

IT Operations has been running on static processes and strict workflows. For instance, ITIL has a process for Change Management that works according to certain steps. There are also a set metrics for measuring performance, like the amount of changes that successfully went through or failed.

IT Ops can plan as much as possible, but it won’t ensure that everything will occur as planned.

For example, when IT implements an application upgrade, and makes changes to the environment, IT administration can go through an entire established process, and still the application doesn’t function as planned. IT managers check the processes that the upgrade went through, yet still performance lags. Then they need to go into the fine, granular details and see every step, identifying the make-up of even minor changes, seeing how it was deployed to all the servers, what is the consistency between servers, have there been additional interference to the servers. They need to take this enormous amount of data – configuration and granular changes – and pinpoint what was the root cause.

Workflow-driven Management Processes

Static processes operate through workflows. The workflow only supports part of the process but there are so many things surrounding the workflow, happening outside the workflow. Business demands can force shortcuts to be taken. Steps in the workflow can be skipped in order to get immediate approval, even omitting the test stage.

Workflows Create False Security

Even when processes are enforced, like having registrations as part of the workflow management, this creates the belief that everything has been solved. There is no organization that can claim they operate completely within the bounds of established processes and approvals.

This situation creates a sense of false security that IT is on top of all the changes. IT Ops can think that everything works perfect and then the organization religiously adheres to their processes, relying on CMDB systems and workflows, ultimately undermining operations.

A Shift in Paradigm to Analytics Driven Management

Neurologists will explain that the brain has two distinct hemispheres. The right side of the brain collects information, while the left side is cognitive and analyzes this information, translating all of the sensory input into usable data.

This is really the same model for today’s IT organization, where operations need to know what is happening now. IT Ops can find itself stuck, trying to adjust static processes while keeping track of and handling dynamic events, and then getting caught off-guard when issues arise. The solution is to approach this situation with dynamic analytics, for dealing with all the changing data, and to see what is really happening. This goes beyond those few designated indicators that were usually watched, rather IT Ops needs Analytic Driven Management, similar to how business has adopted BI, extracting actionable information out of mountains of data to help decision makers respond efficiently.

About Sasha Gilenson

Sasha Gilenson is Founder and CEO of Evolven. Prior to founding Evolven in 2007, he spent 13 years with Mercury Interactive (acquired by HP), managing the QA organization and participating in establishing Mercury Interactive's Software as a Service (SaaS). Sasha played a key role in the development of Mercury Interactive's worldwide Business Technology Optimization (BTO) strategy and drove field operations of the Wireless Business Unit, all while taking on the duties as the Mercury Interactive's top "guru" in quality processes and IT practices domain.

Related Links:

www.evolven.com

Share this

The Latest

September 26, 2023

Generative AI may be a great tool for the enterprise to help drive further innovation and meaningful work, but it also runs the risk of generating massive amounts of spam that will counteract its intended benefits. From increased AI spam bots to data maintenance due to large volumes of outputs, enterprise AI applications can create a cascade of issues that end up detracting from productivity gains ...

September 25, 2023

A long-running study of DevOps practices ... suggests that any historical gains in MTTR reduction have now plateaued. For years now, the time it takes to restore services has stayed about the same: less than a day for high performers but up to a week for middle-tier teams and up to a month for laggards. The fact that progress is flat despite big investments in people, tools and automation is a cause for concern ...

September 21, 2023

Companies implementing observability benefit from increased operational efficiency, faster innovation, and better business outcomes overall, according to 2023 IT Trends Report: Lessons From Observability Leaders, a report from SolarWinds ...

September 20, 2023

IT leaders are driving an increasing number of automation initiatives as a way to stay competitive, reduce costs and scale as they navigate an unpredictable social and economic environment, according to the 2023 State of Automation in IT survey conducted by Jitterbit ...

September 19, 2023

Customer loyalty is changing as retailers get increasingly competitive. More than 75% of consumers say they would end business with a company after a single bad customer experience. This means that just one price discrepancy, inventory mishap or checkout issue in a physical or digital store, could have customers running out to the next store that can provide them with better service. Retailers must be able to predict business outages in advance, and act proactively before an incident occurs, impacting customer experience ...

September 18, 2023
Digital transformation is key to ensuring companies keep up with the competitive market landscape. Putting digital at the core of a business can significantly reduce operating expenses and inefficiencies. However, this process often means changing the way internal teams work with one another. To help with the transition, this blog offers chief experience officers (CXOs) advice on how to lead a successful digital transformation project ...
September 14, 2023

Earlier this year, New Relic conducted a study on observability ... The 2023 Observability Forecast reveals observability's impact on the lives of technical professionals and businesses' bottom lines. Here are 10 key takeaways from the forecast ...

September 13, 2023
On September 10, MGM Resorts experienced what it called a "cybersecurity issue" that had a major impact on the company's systems, showing how cyberattacks can bring down applications, ultimately causing problems for a company in many ways ...
September 12, 2023

Only 33% of executives are "very confident" in their ability to operate in a public cloud environment, according to the 2023 State of CloudOps report from NetApp. This represents an increase from 2022 when only 21% reported feeling very confident ...

September 11, 2023

The majority of organizations across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) breached over the last year had personally identifiable information (PII) compromised, but most have not yet modified their data management policies, according to the Cybersecurity and PII Report from ManageEngine ...