IT Operations Management: Critical Factors in Your … mex38l...IT Operations Management: Critical Factors in Your Future Success IT operations continue to undergo significant changes

IT Operations Management: Critical Factors in Your Future Success

Gartner The Future of IT Conference

October 4-6, 2011 Centro BanamexMexico City, Mexico

David Coyle

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The IT operations management team often has conflicting goals For example the desire to be flexible agileThe IT operations management team often has conflicting goals. For example, the desire to be flexible, agile and roll out out new applications and services quickly is often in conflict with the desire to have stability and high availability. The goal to leverage IT to help the business grow and transform is often at odds with the goal to reduce budgets and optimize costs.

The ability to create a strategic direction for accomplishing these goals and not forsake one for the other is critical to the success of IT operations. In this presentation we will examine five trends in IT that are pushing IT operations in directions that they haven't gone in past We will give details of what these trends are whatIT operations in directions that they haven t gone in past. We will give details of what these trends are, what tactical and strategic actions you should take, and how to demonstrate the business value of each.

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IT operations continue to undergo significant changes to help the business grow It is expected to be innovativeIT operations continue to undergo significant changes to help the business grow. It is expected to be innovative and agile while also achieving higher levels of availability meet compliance requirements and reduce per-unit service delivery costs. What's more, it is faced with the challenge to implement and manage new technologies, such as virtualization, composite applications, and cloud-based services, as well as investing in ITIL and process improvements. Given this broad mixture of demands and opportunities, where should IT operations management (ITOM) invest time and energy, and how should it measure business value? With this background in mind, this presentation will address these key issues:

• What ITOM trends should organizations monitor through 2016?

• What immediate actions can be taken to improve ITOM investments and efficiencies?

• How can the business value of IT operations be better communicated and improved?

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The IT industry continues to evolve at an incredibly rapid rate we have arguably seen more change sinceThe IT industry continues to evolve at an incredibly rapid rate — we have arguably seen more change since 2000 than we have seen in the history of the industry. Moreover, the rate of change is not slowing down. Therefore it is critical and I&O leaders carefully pick the trends they want to follow and invest in. With this in mind, this presentation is focused on five trends that we believe are worth watching. These five trends —shown in the slide — are not meant to represent the five most significant trends in the IT industry overall; rather, they are five important IT operations trends that I&O leaders should maintain on their "watch list."

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Key Issue: What ITOM trends should organizations monitor through 2016?Key Issue: What ITOM trends should organizations monitor through 2016?There is no shortage of tools for ITOM. We have tools for configuration management, asset discovery, event monitoring, application monitoring, capacity planning, problem management, incident management, change management, and much, much more. Furthermore we have noted that most organizations end up purchasing tools in "groups," We are finding buying centers around the three major areas: service management; availability and performance; and configuration and provisioning. The result is a large IT organization ends up with a cacophony of tools often from different vendors and often with little or no out-of-the-box integrationwith a cacophony of tools, often from different vendors, and often with little or no out of the box integration with one another.

To make IT life even more interesting, you can add in the aspects of people and process. Each of these tool groups has its own process requirements and people alignments.

What, then, can bring all of this diversity together? The answer is services. In order for IT to implement business-aligned services, it must draw from the tooling, processes, and people in each group. In effect,

i b th i l f f i th d l i

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services becomes the main lens for focusing the underlying resources.


Key Issue: What immediate actions can be taken to improve ITOM investments andKey Issue: What immediate actions can be taken to improve ITOM investments and efficiencies?We believe that using services as a focusing point of I&O is a worthwhile investment; however, we are cautious to suggest that everyone means the same thing when they use the word "services." As in the case of "cloud," the term "services" has been stretched in many different directions. For example: there is the classic ITIL definition of service; there is the cloud computing variation of services; there are organizations that see services as technical instead of business oriented; and then there are some vendors who bend the term to meetservices as technical instead of business oriented; and then there are some vendors who bend the term to meet the capabilities of their products.

Our point here is not that there is a right or a wrong definition of service. Our point is that we are not all in agreement on that definition. We strongly encourage you to define services within your own organization and then — perhaps even more importantly — stop any vendor or peer that uses the word services and ask for a definition. We must not all assume that we mean the same thing when we say services.

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Key Issue: How can the business value of IT operations be better communicated and improved?Key Issue: How can the business value of IT operations be better communicated and improved?

In the context of Gartner, we embrace the classic ITIL definition of services. Under this definition, services are business-aligned, and therefore, the composition of services will vary from one company to the next based on its industry and business practices. There is no magic list of services to be downloaded and implemented. Instead, we encourage you to take a two-step process to developing and deploying services. The first step is to do a self assessment of what you want out of your IT organization: What is your IT mission statement, what is your role in the business, what are your capabilities, and so forth. This is not a business-facing plan; instead, this is the IT service portfolio that guides your IT i d ili iinvestments and resource utilization.

Whereas the IT service portfolio is IT-centric, the business-facing side of the equation is the IT service catalog. This is where you articulate the capabilities of IT in business terms and language. Your end users — your customers — will go to the IT service catalog to consume your offerings. Therefore, it is critical that you express your services in terms they can understand. Is this an easy, happy path to skip down? No, it is not. The development of an IT service portfolio takes a lot of work and IT soul searching, and the implementation of an IT service catalog takes effort and demands lots of communication with the business. Nonetheless, we feel these are critical to improving the alignment of IT and the

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business.


Key Issue: What ITOM trends should organizations monitor through 2016?Key Issue: What ITOM trends should organizations monitor through 2016?The cold truth is that for most large organizations, it is simply impossible to manage everything. There are too many applications, too many hardware components and too much connective tissue to reasonably handle. As a result, a sensible approach to the problem is to carve applications (or services, if you are service-aligned) into tiers and devote tooling, processes, personnel, and related resources to each tier appropriately. The resource allocation should, of course, match the business value of the application or service being managed.

A ddi i l li i i h i fl f li i d i h b i d li d f id hAn additional complication is the influx of applications and services that are being delivered from outside the data center. This can be an "as a service" style application delivery or classic Internet-based applications, as well as legacy outsourced applications. The problem this presents is that traditional management and monitoring tools are designed to work within the data center on the assumption that all data (sooner or later) flows through the data center. Unfortunately the tiering of resources does not address this problem; instead, we must find another approach.

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Key Issue: What immediate actions can be taken to improve ITOM investments andKey Issue: What immediate actions can be taken to improve ITOM investments and efficiencies?Given that application and service delivery is converging from multiple points — specifically the local device, the data center, and the Internet/cloud — there is only one place where we can actually gauge the end-user experience. That is at the end-user device itself. By shifting our focus to include the end-user experience as a factor, IT can get a better view of what the end-user, and, therefore, the business experience, is actually like.

E b i d i i i ll IT " " li i d i b i d li dEmbracing end-user experience monitoring allows IT to "see" applications and services being delivered outside the scope of internal IT. In most organizations end-users do not understand where applications are being hosted — they only perceive their experience as it relates to application responsiveness. Therefore, when something goes wrong, end users are still quick to get on the phone to the Service Desk regardless of the origin of the application. End-user experience monitoring allows IT to obtain a better view of all application and service behavior — both internal and external — and often see a problem before a user picks up the phone to dial the Service Desk.

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Key Issue: How can the business value of IT operations be better communicated and improved?Key Issue: How can the business value of IT operations be better communicated and improved?

In terms of technology, end-user experience monitoring is a subset of capabilities offered by tools in the application performance monitoring (APM) market. Some of the underlying technology (such as synthetic transaction generation) has been around for awhile, but most of the end-user experience tools themselves are relatively new on the market. This is not a negative issue; rather, it is indicative of vendors developing solutions to address modern problems thanks to Web 2.0, cloud computing and other industry changes.

Because end-user products are relatively new, you will find they do not all have the same capabilities. Eventually, we see p y , y y p y,the products evolving to the state where they all address the four approaches shown in the slide, but for now they are differentiated. Nonetheless, we encourage you to shift some of your spending for monitoring tools from traditional inside-the-data-center monitoring to end-user experience monitoring.

One final advantage of end-user experience monitoring is that it allows IT to find a common language withthe end-users and business units. Because end-user experience monitoring is focused on the end user, thecontext of the monitoring is the end-user perspective — response time, transaction rates, etc. — instead of the IT perspective CPU utilization bandwidth etc

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perspective —CPU utilization, bandwidth, etc.


Key Issue: What ITOM trends should organizations monitor through 2016?Key Issue: What ITOM trends should organizations monitor through 2016?After a decade of use, adoption of software as a service (SaaS) continues to grow and evolve within the enterprise application market. This is occurring as tighter capital budgets demand leaner alternatives, as familiarity with the model increases, and as interest in platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud computing grows. Adoption varies between and within markets. Although use is expandingto a wider range of applications and solutions, the most widespread use is still characterized by horizontal applications with common processes, among distributed virtual workforce teams and within Web 2.0 initiatives. Initial concerns about security, response time, and service availability have diminished for many organizations as SaaS business and computing models have matured and adoption has become more widespread. Usage and vendors' on-demand ecosystems continue to evolve to provide additional business and

h l i i l ifi f i li d i i f d btechnology services, more vertical-specific functionality, and stronger communities of partners and buyers. With the business and even the IT organization acquiring more and more technology utilizing the SaaS delivery and licensing model, it is imperative that the IT organization work with the business to understand the advantages and disadvantages of SaaS. Whenchoosing the SaaS model, the IT organization must also jump in to ensure that the pricing, data protection, security concerns, incentive and penalties and exit clauses within the contract align to business requirements.Action Item: Negotiate contractual assurances with your SaaS provider for uptime, including penalties for noncompliance. However, no contract penalty may be able to compensate for the loss of company image associated with a mission-critical, unplanned service outage

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outage.


Key Issue: What immediate actions can be taken to improve ITOM investments and efficiencies?Key Issue: What immediate actions can be taken to improve ITOM investments and efficiencies?

Sais has emerged as an alternative to the traditional perpetual licensing and delivery models. The benefits of SaaS are many, but we find that the driving forces for many clients is that SaaS tools are purchased in the operating expenditure (opex) budget, the tools have a lower total costs in the medium term, and customers can try the tools in a production environment before they make the purchase. Additionally, customers like the idea of having the vendor manage the software and hardware environment and getting feature and functionality upgrades two to three times a year.

But SaaS is not perfect; it has downsides and complications. Among these are that SaaS applications cannot be counted as p ; p g ppassets on a balance sheet and TCO concerns in the long term. Further, potential security and high availability concerns need to be addressed before deploying the SaaS model. Finally, factors such as integrations with other technologies, the limitations with customization, and controlling release management will continue to be major challenges for all involved.

Action Item: Users should set their expectations for today's SaaS benefits and costs realistically. SaaS is a option that simply improves choice.

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Key Issue: How can the business value of IT operations be better communicated and improved?Key Issue: How can the business value of IT operations be better communicated and improved?The value that IT I&O can deliver to the business is to ensure that SaaS buying options and contracts are well scrutinized and negotiated. The IT organization should assist the business with selecting the best SaaS architecture model, setting service level expectations and negotiate penalties and incentives, and explaining the cost of extras (storage, test environments etc.) that SaaS vendors may charge that are not anticipated. In addition, the I&O can help plan for capacity planning and resource usage contingencies, and evaluate vendor's DR recovery and security capabilities and communicate the risks. Finally the I&O organization, needs to educate the business on dependencies that deliver the IT service as the part the SaaS tool playspart the SaaS tool plays. The I&O organization must also be prepared to manage the ongoing care of the SaaS tool and the IT services it helps deliver. Even if the business bought the SaaS tool without guidance from the IT organization, the IT organizations should (and will most likely be forced to by the business anyway) monitor the SaaS provider to ensure service expectations are being met. Additionally, they should govern data protection, assist with reporting, manage vendor releases as IT projects, and prepare the business for SaaS renewal and contingency plans.

Action Item: Estimate the integration costs of the SaaS or perpetual tool with other technologies in your environment.

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Speak to vendor and customer references to accurately estimate the time and staffing resources that are required for each integration.


Key Issue: What ITOM trends should organizations monitor through 2016?Key Issue: What ITOM trends should organizations monitor through 2016?IT operations personnel — especially those associated with production environments — tend to be careful, methodical, and cautious. The idea of deploying new software or software updates into a production environment in a willy-nilly fashion is anathema to IT operations. IT operations favor rigor, control and scheduled changes. Application development, on the other hand, favors speed and agility. The programming methodologies of today are highly componentized and lend themselves to quick turnarounds in module creation and updates Thetoday are highly componentized and lend themselves to quick turnarounds in module creation and updates. The days of massive, monolithic software programs are in the rear-view mirrors of many organizations. Instead these organizations often focus on how fast they can develop and implement new software modules to gain a competitive edge. These two approaches — rapid development versus careful control — do not blend well. However, for organizations to be successful, they must find a way to facilitate better communications and coordination between application development and operations. Otherwise friction between these two groups will slow down

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progress — or bring it to a halt.


Key Issue: What immediate actions can be taken to improve ITOM investments andKey Issue: What immediate actions can be taken to improve ITOM investments and efficiencies?DevOps is a general industry trend targeted at bringing the worlds of application development and IT operations together. As in the case of ITIL for IT operations, DevOps is not something you implement. Instead, it is set of principles, guidelines and methods to consider for achieving integration between these two groups. Gartner recommends further exploration of DevOps and provides research on the topic.However as in the case of ITIL it is important to be focused on the goal not the guidance ITIL does notHowever, as in the case of ITIL, it is important to be focused on the goal, not the guidance. ITIL does not improve IT operations; it provides suggestions for you to do so. Similarly DevOps does not achieve application development integration; it provides guidance.At the end of the day, the key focus point should be reaching points of agreement between these two groups. If application development can provide better operational awareness in applications, great. If operations can provide better automation support for application development, great. If the two groups can agree on service level goals for applications, great. The key here is to focus on progress, because perfection is a long way away.

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Key Issue: How can the business value of IT operations be better communicated and improved?Key Issue: How can the business value of IT operations be better communicated and improved?Given that aligning IT operations with application development is not a short, simple journey, where should you start? There are conflicts at all levels: different tools, different processes, different organizational drivers, and different types of people. One way to start, is to look at the tools these two groups use for monitoring and managing. A good place to start is with release management — this is the tool (or set of tools) used to transfer applications to operations for product use. Getting agreement on the release process and coordination on the tool choice starts to build the bridge. Beyond that, we see value to common tools for monitoring. Using common tools allows application development and operations to share the same metrics. Thus, when an application module is released to production, application development p , pp p , pp pcan provide a set of metrics that describe "normal" operations. Or if an application module misbehaves in production, operations can provide "bad" metrics to application development that make sense. In short, it gives both groups a common "language."The lack of a common "language" and methodologies has made if difficult for the application development and ITOM team to work together in the past. IT operations should work to understand the concepts of DevOps and software development methodologies (such as agile software development and Scrum). Long-term integration also requires common and consistent alignment to the business and the introduction of new roles and responsibilities. IT operations needs to understand the

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g p pbusiness value applications development provides — and similarly, applications development needs to understand the business value IT operations provides. Both groups should share the same business goals.


Key Issue: What ITOM trends should organizations monitor through 2016?Key Issue: What ITOM trends should organizations monitor through 2016?Social networks exist in several forms. Each has slightly different purposes, spans of control and analysis tasks that come with them. The first realm is internal networks. These social networks are operated by an enterprise for internal use. Access and content can be controlled. Analysis can lead to understanding who is working together and on what topics, which drives workforce optimization. The second realm is externally facing social software, where people outside the company are invited to use company-operated social applications. Access and control still remain, although a strict approach may not be appropriate with customers and the public. Analysis helps determine the level of engagement and how well the goals of the social applications are being met, such as support, selling or training. The last realm is Internet-based social applications, where the enterprise has little control. These may support a F b k T itt d f th b t th 't dit l ' k Sit h Y T b t l bl d tiFacebook page, a Twitter name, and so forth, but they can't edit people's remarks. Sites such as YouTube, external blogs and rating services also fall into the public arena. IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) can utilize these different realms of social network analysis to create a strategy for social media within their organization. A social media strategy for IT I&O should include technology, processes, and people alignment for:• Capturing and facilitating collaboration with IT• Promoting crowdsourcing among employees• Promoting the value of IT services to the business

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Key Issue: How can integrated process disciplines increase service quality?

Key Issue: What immediate actions can be taken to improve ITOM investments and efficiencies?Key Issue: What immediate actions can be taken to improve ITOM investments and efficiencies?Similar to any successful IT initiative, we have to align technology, processes and people together. Process: A first step in a social media strategy is to understand the larger social media strategy that your business is deploying. Align you social media strategy with your company's external social media strategy. Additionally, social media processes should not becreated in an island, but rather needs to be integrated into existing workflows and processes. Using stakeholders throughout the entire IT organization, develop guidelines for what, where, when, why IT will leverage social media.People: A social media policy should be well-written and comprehensive, but it is unlikely that the policy alone will be all that is needed to instruct employees about their responsibilities for social media. A well-designed communication plan, backed up by a training program helps to make the policy come to life so that employees understand not just what the policy says but how it impactstraining program, helps to make the policy come to life so that employees understand not just what the policy says, but how it impacts them. It also explains what the organization expects to gain from its participation in social media.Technology: Most enterprises offer a variety of social software and collaboration choices, and mainstream workers now want to use them to share opinions, interact with peers, build personal networks and create business value. However, social-software tools have overlapping functions (for example, blogs, wikis and discussion forums all allow users to post ideas and get responses). These overlaps make it easy to choose the wrong tool, which could prevent users from achieving goals. Users unfamiliar with these choices seek help to distinguish between the different possibilities, asking when they should use a blog, wiki, discussion forum or document repository. Therefore, workers often ask the IT organization for help in choosing the right tool for the task. Users who do not understand the differences between the tools offered will resist the introduction of new tools often using the first one they become

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understand the differences between the tools offered will resist the introduction of new tools, often using the first one they become familiar with in all situations, even when better tools are available.


Key Issue: How can the business value of IT operations be better communicated and improved?Key Issue: How can the business value of IT operations be better communicated and improved?Today's IT service management (ITSM) tools provide little support for ad hoc interactions and other forms of collaboration among IT operations personnel. Typically, only well-documented processes can be transformed into structured ITSM flows, leaving a substantial number of IT tasks with little opportunity for conversion into reusable assets. Social collaboration can capture these ah hoc interactions with I&O, which will aid in better decision making, create an audit trail, and allow for the repurposing of theknowledge.Another aspect of social media that the IT organization can leverage is social collaboration and feedback. Social media tools and best practices offer the IT organization a new mechanism to engage the business with communications that are bidirectional, collaborative

d h bl Th i l IT i d hi h ll d "f ll " l h IT i hand searchable. They can creatively promote IT services and support, which allows end users to "follow" only those IT services that are important to them. An exciting potential of social networking for a business is social collaboration (sometimes referred to as crowdsourcing), where communities of end users collaborate to develop some new intellectual capital. Social collaboration withinthe business is not a new concept. Social collaboration technologies and processes now allow employees to share knowledge and ask questions not just within the coworkers circle, but within the entire organization. This collaborative data can be stored, shared, searched, commented on and improved on by the entire community.Risks of not participating: The company or IT organization is viewed as antiquated and not evolving, giving competition or stealth social networking an opportunity to flourish. The company or IT organization has decreased awareness among digital natives, and

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g y y g g ghas difficulty attracting new staff and promoting new initiatives.


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Documents

IT Operations Management: Critical Factors in Your … mex38l...IT Operations Management: Critical Factors in Your Future Success IT operations continue to undergo significant changes