IT Service Management-Make way for Platforms

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1 IT Service Management-Make way for Platforms Author: Pranjal Jayachandra Copyright 2014, Tech Mahindra. All rights reserved. 1

2 IT Service Management The challenges amidst new business dynamics IT infrastructures are getting more complex; and, at the same time, IT leadership is facing pressures to continuously improve the IT stack. IT leaders are facing challenges to balance the pressures of Technology Refresh against the shrinking budgets available for such refresh and on-going support. Some of the key challenges that IT leaders are facing today are: Increasing Complexity of IT Infrastructures: Increasingly heterogeneous IT Infrastructures (due to Cloud, Mobility, SaaS, CoIT, BYOD) are creating a new set of concerns for IT Leaders in managing the IT Operations effectively and efficiently. Increasing costs of resources: The increased scale of IT requires more efficient usage of costly resources across the board, putting pressures to create more optimized management approaches. Geographical Independence and Globalization: The increasing geographical distribution of infrastructure resources imposes demands on Compliance, Governance and Efficiency. Repeatability, Consistency, Efficiency: The Repeatability and consistency of the performance of routine and repeatable services, requires that the tasks are made independent of human effort. Emphasis on Non-linearity of Operational Support costs: It is becoming critical to decouple the manpower effort from IT scale. Why is Automation becoming critical to IT Service Management? It is evident that people based mechanisms to manage the IT Infrastructure are not equipped to handle these increasing demands of the new world order. Some of these limitations of people based approaches to IT Service Management that IT leaders have to deal with, are: People Dependence: Our experience suggests that more than 70% incidents in IT infrastructure management have been caused by manual errors. Knowledge Retention: The current approaches and practices have 80% dependence on repetitive tasks knowledge retention and repeatability is a challenge for manual processes. Controls and Compliance: Complex IT Infrastructures and broad distribution of systems require multiple levels of Governance and controls that are difficult to implement because of the gaps that widen with scale and diversification of infrastructure. Data Security: Our experience and analysis through decades of complex Infrastructure management projects indicate that 60-70% of data leaks can be zeroed-in on to people aspects 2

3 Scaling Costs: The linear nature of IT management practices put enormous limitations with the increasing scale of infrastructures. The need of the hour, then, is to look for Automation Opportunities at a broader scale and in a platform manner. There s a clear trend to move from People-centric mechanism to Platformcentric approach to IT Service Management. As these findings from Forrester Research indicate clearly, the Automation and Dashboards, Analytics, Decision Support and E2E visibility and management views are providing the necessary leverage for IT management teams to get more efficient IT Service Delivery in place. Automated Workflows are becoming key to the ITSM cycle automation and E2E Process Management. Similarly, Resource forecasting and system-based provisioning is becoming an important aspect of Support & Resource Management. Automation is becoming critical for the overall IMS performance. Source: Forrester Research Inc, 2008 Through our decades of experience in IT Infrastructure management, we have looked at better way to serve our clients and meet the increasing demands of their business. IT Service Automation is an innovative approach that breaks off from the traditional incremental models and provides a drastically improved overall Effectiveness of IT Infrastructure management, and better alignment of resources to meet the business objectives. Enter Platform-centric Approach to IT Service Management The Primary goals of IT Service Automation are minimization of Cycle Time, reduction in overall Effort, and minimization of human errors. However, achieving these consistently requires an approach that productizes such automated services, and follows a Platform philosophy. The objectives and purpose of such an Automated Infrastructure Management Services Platform would be 3

4 Non-linearity: Ability to scale infrastructure elements without a proportionate increase in the support resources Improved Cycle Times: An Automated system would turnaround the repetitive tasks at a much improved cycle time. Automation Accelerators Improved Governance & Control: An automated workflow provides the visibility at processes and sub-processes level that can lead to a better overall transparency and governance. Reduced freak incidents: The automated systems provide a more consistent and repeatable operations. The manual errors for the same routine procedures and tasks should be drastically reduced. Orchestration Framework & Methodology Unified Service Automation Platform Service Automation Analyst No vendor lock-in: Ability to decouple from the dependency with underlying systems. This decoupling of knowledge and capability of the vendor-specific systems from the IT Operations helps drastically reduce the impact of any changes and transformations. Managing Guaranteed Outcomes with Platform Approach A Platform-centric approach centralized around the automation philosophy provides the IT leaders the necessary leverage to counter the challenges thrown up by the new business dynamics. Our experience over multiple customer engagements suggests that the human elements can be curtailed by putting together an automation driven, re-deployable, packaged set of tools and mechanisms that allow for guaranteed outcomes. At the Center of the approach lies the Unified Service Automation Platform. Automation Accelerator aids the Platform with an automated and rapid approach toward builds and transformations. The Orchestration framework has the toolkits for Process and tasks Assessments, while the Service Automation Analysts are the necessary human element driven by an exhaustive Academy approach for the skill-set enhancement, consistency and availability. 4

5 Unified Service Automation Platform Automation Accelerators Central to the approach is a Unified Service Operation Platform for Single window operations, Seamless tool integration, and RBA 2.0 compliant. This is an IT Ops equivalent of ERP. More than 900+ processes need to be followed in IT Operations. It s important to achieve a rapid Build & Development cycle for these processes, for overall transition efficiency. The platform leverages Mobility as an important driver for seamless operations from a user standpoint. Workflow automation is key to efficiency; hence the orchestration framework is closely integrated to the core Service Automation Platform. These accelerators further get a learning curve boost through IMS Automation Factory with Automation Analysts to fast track IT Ops automation cycles. Orchestration Framework and Methodology Orchestration framework provides the much needed workflow automation with its Service Operations framework, supported by the Automation assessments and Service Automation Methodology. Automation Assessments leverage rapid progress Tool kits such as Process & Task assessments for Automation. These are further aided by Information gathering kits. Service Automation Analysts A fast track Automation approach leverages the IMS Academy to enable Automation Competency Lab and ensuring Analysts readiness for on-boarding on demand. For sustainable scale, the Academy concept has been launched at colleges and universities; as well as extended to lateral trainings for existing IT Management workforce within the organization. 5

6 What can you do? The move from People based Operational approach to a Platform based IT Service Management Solution is critical for IT leaders to meet the increasing business demands and technological complexity. Service Automation Platforms are the way forward. The journey to leverage the platform approach requires that IT Leaders are ready organizationally as well as technologically. Here are few keys steps before one can employ a platform approach to IT Services Automation. 1. Assess the current state of IT Management, and where the organization is in terms of ITSM Maturity 2. Assess the level of Automation and the current efficiency levels in terms of Support Costs per element, Service Request Turnaround Times, Build and Deploy Cycle Efficiencies, and so on. 3. Identify the high level objectives of the IT organization in terms of technology refresh and IT Services Effectiveness 4. Assess the current IT Operations processes and provide the high level view on: o Process categorization, Process maturity & Automatable processes o Have a check on already automated processes and their approach (Can they be reusable and portable?) 5. Prepare a Process automation Priority matrix at the end of assessment, along with the Implementation plan 6. Prepare an Adoption plan and adoption measurement criteria 7. Identify the Technology Stack that needs to leverage the Automation Platform. Perform the assessment in terms of rollout and timelines. This journey requires that you leverage the help of an experienced implementation partner who can help you earn quick wins earlier in the cycle and ensure sustainable and guaranteed outcomes through the Automation roadmap. 6

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