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Time for IT Operations to Change its Game

David Hayward

The velocity of how enterprises continuously transform their businesses — and change the game of entire markets — is mind-boggling. Apple changed the music industry forever with its iTunes service. Netflix's mail-order CD business crushed its brick-and-motor competitors and now grabs viewers from traditional cable TV providers with its video streaming service and home-grown, Emmy-nominated dramas. And, as recently reported in the news media, Google Chromebooks have come from nowhere to grab nearly a fifth of the US school purchases of mobile computers.

IT development is on board with business transformation, being more agile than ever by building the apps that drive new, innovative services. But what about IT Operations? More than ever, real-time business performance is intertwined with IT infrastructure health. Any lapse in online service performance is felt all the way from the customer to the board room. IT Operations needs to know how to change its game.

According to Jim Frey, VP of Research at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), operations centers are responding to business pressures by transforming from technology alert monitoring into "cross-domain services management organizations." Instead of handling alerts separately from each technology domain (networks, servers, databases, applications), this new kind of operations organization is looking to correlate events and incidents across technology domains and relate them to how they impact specific business services that domains collectively support. According to Frey,"This new cross-domain operations layer in the IT organization is an essential strategy for overcoming the challenges of finding root cause of what impacts services in today's complex infrastructures – and doing it at the speed that businesses demand."

Make-overs like these require monitoring capable of driving new service-focused operational processes and responsibilities. Monitoring tools must analyze service impact across technology domains. Service impact data can be used to drive service-focused incident and problem management processes. Then Operations staff can shift from red-yellow-green infrastructure alert monitoring to service impact alert handling.

A recent Tech Validate poll of organizations moving to cross-domain service management revealed how IT organizations are changing their game. Using service-oriented tools to support new processes, they are transforming IT Operations to support broad business initiatives, such as new business models, new services for gaining market share, and new IT technologies.

Other Tech Validate research found that organizations are implementing cross-domain service management to improve service root cause analysis, be more proactive in addressing service issues and be more successful in assuring that service level objectives are met.

A good example of hand-in-hand business and IT transformation is Lexmark. Known worldwide for its printer products, the company is currently undergoing a major transformation that will take it from a manufacturing and supply chain organization to a printing solutions and software provider. The ability to see the impact of an individual issue on critical process is helping Lexmark improve services and even avoid incidents before they happen. According Lance Neal, manager of the IT Operational Excellence Program at Lexmark, "The focus has shifted away from checking components in silos to ensuring that the end-to-end process works, which is helping improve service internally and to customers."

David Hayward is Senior Principal Manager, Solutions Marketing at CA Technologies.

Related Links:

www.ca.com/apm

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Time for IT Operations to Change its Game

David Hayward

The velocity of how enterprises continuously transform their businesses — and change the game of entire markets — is mind-boggling. Apple changed the music industry forever with its iTunes service. Netflix's mail-order CD business crushed its brick-and-motor competitors and now grabs viewers from traditional cable TV providers with its video streaming service and home-grown, Emmy-nominated dramas. And, as recently reported in the news media, Google Chromebooks have come from nowhere to grab nearly a fifth of the US school purchases of mobile computers.

IT development is on board with business transformation, being more agile than ever by building the apps that drive new, innovative services. But what about IT Operations? More than ever, real-time business performance is intertwined with IT infrastructure health. Any lapse in online service performance is felt all the way from the customer to the board room. IT Operations needs to know how to change its game.

According to Jim Frey, VP of Research at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), operations centers are responding to business pressures by transforming from technology alert monitoring into "cross-domain services management organizations." Instead of handling alerts separately from each technology domain (networks, servers, databases, applications), this new kind of operations organization is looking to correlate events and incidents across technology domains and relate them to how they impact specific business services that domains collectively support. According to Frey,"This new cross-domain operations layer in the IT organization is an essential strategy for overcoming the challenges of finding root cause of what impacts services in today's complex infrastructures – and doing it at the speed that businesses demand."

Make-overs like these require monitoring capable of driving new service-focused operational processes and responsibilities. Monitoring tools must analyze service impact across technology domains. Service impact data can be used to drive service-focused incident and problem management processes. Then Operations staff can shift from red-yellow-green infrastructure alert monitoring to service impact alert handling.

A recent Tech Validate poll of organizations moving to cross-domain service management revealed how IT organizations are changing their game. Using service-oriented tools to support new processes, they are transforming IT Operations to support broad business initiatives, such as new business models, new services for gaining market share, and new IT technologies.

Other Tech Validate research found that organizations are implementing cross-domain service management to improve service root cause analysis, be more proactive in addressing service issues and be more successful in assuring that service level objectives are met.

A good example of hand-in-hand business and IT transformation is Lexmark. Known worldwide for its printer products, the company is currently undergoing a major transformation that will take it from a manufacturing and supply chain organization to a printing solutions and software provider. The ability to see the impact of an individual issue on critical process is helping Lexmark improve services and even avoid incidents before they happen. According Lance Neal, manager of the IT Operational Excellence Program at Lexmark, "The focus has shifted away from checking components in silos to ensuring that the end-to-end process works, which is helping improve service internally and to customers."

David Hayward is Senior Principal Manager, Solutions Marketing at CA Technologies.

Related Links:

www.ca.com/apm

TechValidate Poll: CA Service Operations Insight's Role in IT and Business Transformation

TechValidate Poll: Challenges that CA Service Operations Insight Addresses

Hot Topics

The Latest

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...