IT organizations worldwide are juggling to keep services running at expected availability and performance levels AND to execute new IT projects, such as adding new customer services, building out the network and enhancing old services. If you too are being squeezed like this, then it is worth your time to compare notes with others who are keeping all the balls in the air at once.
One such enterprise customer (call them “Company X”) is a leader in its field, is highly profitable and has a lean and mean IT workforce that amounts to only 1% of the total 12,000 company employees.
That’s only about 160 IT professionals.
They have three main groups within IT: Application Development, Help Desk/PC Support Group and Operations. The Operations Team, which manages infrastructure and applications, has less than 60 employees.
Besides using commercial enterprise applications, the company builds a lot of their own applications. They have more than 1,000 network devices, more than 1,000 servers and more than 50,000 devices on customer premises that they remotely monitor and control.
Their overarching strategy for IT excellence has three vectors:
- Drive customer and employee value by offering new services;
- Assure availability and performance of new and old services; and
- Prepare the IT organization to support long-term business growth.
Vector #1 relies on understanding the market’s needs, having a development team capable of delivering competitive, customer-facing IT-based services to take market share and offering the right employee-facing services to support the business’ objectives.
Vector #2 relies on IT management tools that can manage IT silos to meet operating level expectations and to manage those IT silos together to meet service-level agreements (SLA) for employee- and customer-facing application (i.e. business) services.
Vector #3 relies on IT operational efficiency so within budget, the IT workforce can continuously create new services and support them along with previously-built services.
Aside from these three Vectors, additional success factors include sound implementation of IT governance, asset, financial, project management and portfolio management. And don’t forget virtualization, private cloud and hybrid cloud implementations are the big game-changers in terms of ‘doing more with less’ capital expense and having the ‘agility’ to meet time-to-market and service-load demand.
Let’s assume that you have projects (Vector #1 above) to build competitive IT-based customer-facing services and new employee-facing services to run the business. To keep these running and to loosen up finite resources to keep building additional services, you need to execute Vectors #2 and #3. This requires that you organize and execute IT according to best-practice frameworks: a role-based operations team structure and standardized, documented processes to flow through the structure.
As I pointed out in a previous blog, IT management is like a biological or physical environmental system in which “form and function” (i.e. structure and processes) are inseparable – and that it is important to visualize them as such in order to achieve your IT-business alignment/integration.
Company X, cited above, is in an ongoing process of implementing best-practices based on an ITIL framework and evolutionary change in their IT organizational structure continues.
A few years ago they instituted an ITIL-oriented program — following ITIL processes especially for managing configuration change (Figure 1). Rules were put in place to allow certain documented changes to be implemented with silo manager approval, but other changes require Change Advisory Board review and approval, then implementation timing according to a Release Manager’s approval. Even without an ITIL-prescribed configuration management database, they have roped-in change management chaos … and have future plans for a CMDB.
Their IT operations organization (Figure 2) has morphed over time to execute Strategy Vector #2; meaning they have the right talent — and cost of talent — positioned to efficiently solve problems and then hand those off when deeper domain knowledge is required (Figure 3).
But with customers’ budgets strained in today’s slow economy, Company X is saddled with a flat IT budget and flat IT headcount. To cope, Company X acquired a combination of new IT silo and service operations management tools that enable them to keep fewer “eyes-on-glass” and more hands on new added-value projects (Figure 4). As Company X’s director of operations said, “We’ve implemented the intelligence to tell us when things are going wrong, so we don’t have to watch what’s going on all the time in order to spot them. This gives us more time to focus on the 100 or more new projects.”
As Company X gets more experience with more intelligent IT tools, they continue to shift eyes-on-glass to more productive (value-added) labor by tweaking operational processes handled at various levels of the organizational frameworks. Also, organizations gain new insights about their environment with tools that relate silo monitoring information to business service performance and risk, they tweak their actual processes.
Company X’s goal is to evolve its operations team from a traditional NOC (network operations center) processes to next-generation SOC (service operations center) cross-domain processes — first by giving them smart new cross domain tools for triaging services equipped with an OMDB (operational management database) and over time empower those individuals to remediate more issues themselves. As the director explained, “More of our staff will become knowledgeable across silos (Figure 5).”
IT silos are one of the major causes of IT inefficiency, prolonged triage and mean-time-to-repair of service issues, and escalating costs of service delivery. The evolution of IT management tools is breaking down the silos to the benefit of business and to the business of IT: infrastructure management tools are becoming application-aware, applications performance management tools are becoming more infrastructure-aware, and finally operations center big boards are evolving into dashboards that proactively tell you how silos put business services at risk and trigger automated workflow to fix problems — further freeing labor for added-value projects.
As you solve more issues higher up the organization architecture, you enable those at the lower reaches of the organization — those more expensive resources who have more domain expertise — to spend less time keeping the lights on and more time manufacturing new bulbs.
Questions to ponder:
- How are good are you at balancing eyes-on-glass with hands-on the business?
- How are you evolving your organizations’ structure and processes?
- What are you using for reference frameworks? And how are you measuring the benefits?
[...] Figure 1 illustrates the kind of role-based process framework organizations are putting in place to enable these DOs and DON’Ts. It was also discussed in a previous blog: Balancing Act: A Framework for IT Transformation. [...]