Step back from the daily grind, take it all in and assess exactly what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong and what you can do effectively and more efficiently. No matter what your profession is, pausing a moment to take the “long view” is a good thing. As long-view thinking goes, it often has something to do with concepts of maturity or evolution of processes.

There’s a fascination with the idea of evolution. Biological sciences treat this idea as the long march from simple, single cell organisms to complex multi-cellular organisms with specialized groups of cells in an ever-increasingly complex ecological system of inter-dependent species. Primate evolution tops off with Homo Sapiens, whose Darwinian advantage over competing primates came through gene selection that enabled higher language, complex tool-building, social organization (i.e. culture). Around 10,000 years ago, culture appeared and has since been a source of evolution that has far out-paced human biological evolution in its impact on our species. Our genetic make-up is identical to hunter-gatherer tribes, yet our culture puts us light years ahead of theirs in terms of our ability to harness nature and survive.

Like any major human undertaking, IT Operations must manage a lot of moving parts in order to produce its desired outcome. A manufacturer manages material, capital equipment, shop floor, engineering/design, sales, marketing, financial and other components. A healthcare organization manages nursing, physician, equipment, drug, facilities and many more components. IT Operations has its own components: technologies (network, computer systems, applications, databases) and the related IT staff that support services to end-users.

Unless these complex organizations apply what scientists call “Systems Thinking” to their daily operations, the task of producing their particular desired outcomes will be inefficient, possibly chaotic and unnecessarily costly. For IT Operations, desired outcomes are to maintain the quality and availability of IT-based business services according to service-level agreements, operational-level agreements or implicit end-user expectations. Systems Thinking is about viewing complex issues holistically: analyzing relationships of parts and their impact on one another versus analyzing parts of things in isolation (i.e., “in silos”).

Without the proper amount of “Systems Thinking,” IT Operations is thinking in silos and will experience slow mean-time-to-repair of service-impacting issues, wasteful troubleshooting and misalignment with business priorities. Everyone in IT knows what finger-pointing means when something goes wrong: like a major outage or a crippling degradation. Operations can be downright chaotic, especially as applications and infrastructure get more complex, more virtual and more cloud-based.

Service Assurance is a term that connotes 360-degree situational awareness of business services, (i.e., a consolidated, real-time, predictive view of all silos, workloads and their relationship to a service). Where previous business service management (BSM) solutions have fell short, IT organizations need a next-generation approach to align IT with the business. This new approach must be designed to build bridges of communication and promote collaboration across the cultural and political barriers within IT organizations in an ITIL-like fashion.

Not that the business cares about ITIL, but they do care that IT has a repeatable means of working so that we can be consistent — and ITIL is a source of best practices that can be used or adapted. ITIL can and should be used to ensure that domains handle, for example, incidents or changes, according to a policy that is adhered-to across the organization. To promote ITIL-like best practices, IT organizations need a Service Assurance (i.e., a 360-degree) view shared by all siloed IT teams so they have a common understanding of services and service impact to enable closed-loop service life cycle management.