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Transforming Operations, and IT as a Whole, with the Right Technology Investments

Dennis Drogseth

In my last blog, I expressed my opinion that IT operations teams may be about to enjoy a renaissance rather than dismally fading away — but only if they adopt new ways of working, measuring themselves and interacting with business stakeholders.

Start with Is IT Operations Going Away or Is It Enjoying a Renaissance?

In this blog, I'd like to discuss how technology investments can help smooth the way toward operational transformation with a few examples from recent interviews. More specifically, I'd like to focus on three key areas of innovation, all in some way related to Advanced IT Analytics (what some in the industry call IT Operations Analytics or ITOA):

1. How Advanced IT Analytics (AIA) can pave the way

2. How next-generation ITSM promotes AIA-relevant process improvements

3. How AIA and service modeling can become a magic combination

These three areas of innovation are, admittedly, far from a complete list. But hopefully they will offer you a provocative place to start for seeking out transformative IT technologies.

How Advanced IT Analytics Can Pave the Way

Probably one of the hottest, most diverse and most misunderstood areas of technological innovation is AIA. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the most significant reason is that AIA is not a single market but a diverse landscape of options ranging from those bordering on traditional "big data" to those that are focused on real-time predictive insights with tiered approaches to data collection that typically include leveraging third-party tools. The variances here also embrace multiple use cases ranging from performance management to change and capacity optimization to financial optimization to integrated security concerns.

Here are just a few highlights from EMA's recent AIA research focusing on performance, change and capacity management:

■ AIA analytic heuristics range from anomaly detection to predictive trending to machine learning, to rule-based analytics to data mining — as just some examples. On average, our respondents wanted at least four different heuristics.

■ On average, respondents wanted their AIA investments to support 11 different roles (and many more stakeholders), including four domain-specific roles, four cross-domain roles (including executive IT), and three non-IT business roles.

■ The top three achieved benefits were with faster time to repair problems, faster time to deliver new services and more efficient use of cloud resources.

Quoting from a conversation earlier this year:

QUOTE #1: "The move [to advanced analytics] allowed us to unify our operations team with a single-pane-of-glass view and drill down so that we could share information more effectively. In the past, we caught only 3% of our problems proactively. Now that percentage went up to 88% … In effect, we are able to see everything we need to see to focus and resolve issues far more cohesively and dynamically than before."

How Next-Generation ITSM Promotes AIA-Relevant Process Improvements

Next-generation ITSM is in my view pivotal for both IT and IT operational transformation. So what are they? Next-generation ITSM teams are more progressively integrated with operations teams, more proactive, more likely to leverage and share analytics, more likely to provide workflows and automation that unify IT as a whole (as well as support enterprise business process needs), and more likely to provide meaningful metrics for IT efficiencies and governance than the more reactive ITSM teams of the past.

Following the AIA data path, we saw that 82% of our respondents indicated strong levels of ITSM/operations integration for shared advanced analytics!

Quoting from two other conversations earlier this year highlighting next-generation ITSM values:

QUOTE #2: "First and foremost we've been able to consolidate our processes for change, incident, and problem management across our entire operation by leveraging one single platform …"

QUOTE #3: "We've also enjoyed improved visibility into the impacts of changes on service performance and availability, so we can more quickly get to the root cause of many of the issues caused by changes and begin to automate fixes more consistently."

How AIA + Service Modeling Can Result in (at least a little) Magic

The AIA research showed that 96% of respondents wanted at least some level of modeled insight on interdependencies across the application infrastructure. Among the top three priorities were application-to-infrastructure, infrastructure-to-infrastructure, and application-to-application (application ecosystem) dependency insights.

Combining analytics with service modeling is a growth area in AIA, as analytics providers are becoming more effective in not only leveraging existing application dependency mapping solutions and even CMDB data, but also in creating their own unique approach to dependency modeling.

In another very recent dialog, I found some rather striking benefits when service modeling and analytics are combined:

QUOTE #4: "We estimate that we will be saving about $500,000 in the area of toolset consolidation … We were averaging 2.5 hours for MTTR … now it's about 38 minutes … You might say we never had eyes before. Now we have eyes."

In Summary

This is, admittedly, only a taste of what I've learned from research and conversations with IT about how technology can help to transform IT operations for the "brave new world" we live in. My focus on AIA, next-generation ITSM and service modeling was deliberate, as I see these as lying at the heart of the "operations renaissance." Also important are requirements for more advanced levels of automation and integrated support for security and operations. Superior digital experience management or end user experience management is also key.

The challenge in the market today is that while all these technologies are interdependent and mutually reinforcing, the innovations are coming from many different vendor sources. And true to form, many of these vendors are seeking to redefine the world around themselves in their marketing and messaging. Sorting through the pieces, and understanding where real value lies, takes time and patience and more than a little sober skepticism. But the innovations are real. And hopefully this blog can give you at least a hint — by category — of where to begin to look for them.

I deliberately kept the quotes anonymous on all fronts. If you'd like to see more information, then please check out our EMA library:

quote 1

quotes 2 and 3

quote 4

Image removed.

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The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership ... As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes ...

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Transforming Operations, and IT as a Whole, with the Right Technology Investments

Dennis Drogseth

In my last blog, I expressed my opinion that IT operations teams may be about to enjoy a renaissance rather than dismally fading away — but only if they adopt new ways of working, measuring themselves and interacting with business stakeholders.

Start with Is IT Operations Going Away or Is It Enjoying a Renaissance?

In this blog, I'd like to discuss how technology investments can help smooth the way toward operational transformation with a few examples from recent interviews. More specifically, I'd like to focus on three key areas of innovation, all in some way related to Advanced IT Analytics (what some in the industry call IT Operations Analytics or ITOA):

1. How Advanced IT Analytics (AIA) can pave the way

2. How next-generation ITSM promotes AIA-relevant process improvements

3. How AIA and service modeling can become a magic combination

These three areas of innovation are, admittedly, far from a complete list. But hopefully they will offer you a provocative place to start for seeking out transformative IT technologies.

How Advanced IT Analytics Can Pave the Way

Probably one of the hottest, most diverse and most misunderstood areas of technological innovation is AIA. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the most significant reason is that AIA is not a single market but a diverse landscape of options ranging from those bordering on traditional "big data" to those that are focused on real-time predictive insights with tiered approaches to data collection that typically include leveraging third-party tools. The variances here also embrace multiple use cases ranging from performance management to change and capacity optimization to financial optimization to integrated security concerns.

Here are just a few highlights from EMA's recent AIA research focusing on performance, change and capacity management:

■ AIA analytic heuristics range from anomaly detection to predictive trending to machine learning, to rule-based analytics to data mining — as just some examples. On average, our respondents wanted at least four different heuristics.

■ On average, respondents wanted their AIA investments to support 11 different roles (and many more stakeholders), including four domain-specific roles, four cross-domain roles (including executive IT), and three non-IT business roles.

■ The top three achieved benefits were with faster time to repair problems, faster time to deliver new services and more efficient use of cloud resources.

Quoting from a conversation earlier this year:

QUOTE #1: "The move [to advanced analytics] allowed us to unify our operations team with a single-pane-of-glass view and drill down so that we could share information more effectively. In the past, we caught only 3% of our problems proactively. Now that percentage went up to 88% … In effect, we are able to see everything we need to see to focus and resolve issues far more cohesively and dynamically than before."

How Next-Generation ITSM Promotes AIA-Relevant Process Improvements

Next-generation ITSM is in my view pivotal for both IT and IT operational transformation. So what are they? Next-generation ITSM teams are more progressively integrated with operations teams, more proactive, more likely to leverage and share analytics, more likely to provide workflows and automation that unify IT as a whole (as well as support enterprise business process needs), and more likely to provide meaningful metrics for IT efficiencies and governance than the more reactive ITSM teams of the past.

Following the AIA data path, we saw that 82% of our respondents indicated strong levels of ITSM/operations integration for shared advanced analytics!

Quoting from two other conversations earlier this year highlighting next-generation ITSM values:

QUOTE #2: "First and foremost we've been able to consolidate our processes for change, incident, and problem management across our entire operation by leveraging one single platform …"

QUOTE #3: "We've also enjoyed improved visibility into the impacts of changes on service performance and availability, so we can more quickly get to the root cause of many of the issues caused by changes and begin to automate fixes more consistently."

How AIA + Service Modeling Can Result in (at least a little) Magic

The AIA research showed that 96% of respondents wanted at least some level of modeled insight on interdependencies across the application infrastructure. Among the top three priorities were application-to-infrastructure, infrastructure-to-infrastructure, and application-to-application (application ecosystem) dependency insights.

Combining analytics with service modeling is a growth area in AIA, as analytics providers are becoming more effective in not only leveraging existing application dependency mapping solutions and even CMDB data, but also in creating their own unique approach to dependency modeling.

In another very recent dialog, I found some rather striking benefits when service modeling and analytics are combined:

QUOTE #4: "We estimate that we will be saving about $500,000 in the area of toolset consolidation … We were averaging 2.5 hours for MTTR … now it's about 38 minutes … You might say we never had eyes before. Now we have eyes."

In Summary

This is, admittedly, only a taste of what I've learned from research and conversations with IT about how technology can help to transform IT operations for the "brave new world" we live in. My focus on AIA, next-generation ITSM and service modeling was deliberate, as I see these as lying at the heart of the "operations renaissance." Also important are requirements for more advanced levels of automation and integrated support for security and operations. Superior digital experience management or end user experience management is also key.

The challenge in the market today is that while all these technologies are interdependent and mutually reinforcing, the innovations are coming from many different vendor sources. And true to form, many of these vendors are seeking to redefine the world around themselves in their marketing and messaging. Sorting through the pieces, and understanding where real value lies, takes time and patience and more than a little sober skepticism. But the innovations are real. And hopefully this blog can give you at least a hint — by category — of where to begin to look for them.

I deliberately kept the quotes anonymous on all fronts. If you'd like to see more information, then please check out our EMA library:

quote 1

quotes 2 and 3

quote 4

Image removed.

The Latest

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Despite the frustrations, every engineer we spoke with ultimately affirmed the value and power of OpenTelemetry. The "sucks" moments are often the flip side of its greatest strengths ... Part 2 of this blog covers the powerful advantages and breakthroughs — the "OTel Rocks" moments ...

OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

Enterprises are turning to AI-powered software platforms to make IT management more intelligent and ensure their systems and technology meet business needs for efficiency, lowers costs and innovation, according to new research from Information Services Group ...

The power of Kubernetes lies in its ability to orchestrate containerized applications with unparalleled efficiency. Yet, this power comes at a cost: the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of its architecture creates a monitoring challenge akin to tracking a constantly shifting, interconnected network of fleeting entities ... Due to the dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes, monitoring poses a substantial challenge for DevOps and platform engineers. Here are the primary obstacles ...

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership ... As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes ...

More than half (51%) of companies are already leveraging AI agents, according to the PagerDuty Agentic AI Survey. Agentic AI adoption is poised to accelerate faster than generative AI (GenAI) while reshaping automation and decision-making across industries ...

Image
Pagerduty

 

Real privacy protection thanks to technology and processes is often portrayed as too hard and too costly to implement. So the most common strategy is to do as little as possible just to conform to formal requirements of current and incoming regulations. This is a missed opportunity ...

The expanding use of AI is driving enterprise interest in data operations (DataOps) to orchestrate data integration and processing and improve data quality and validity, according to a new report from Information Services Group (ISG) ...