IT Operations has been evolving for over three decades, albeit slowly. Sure, there have been times when evolution has accelerated, but technology and the complexity of IT has been accelerating so fast. For most IT Operations executives, managing technology and IT is just plugging the holes of the dyke as the flood water continues to raise. In response, tech leaders are sounding the call for evolving ITOps to an AIOps strategy to increase bandwidth and enable organizational change management during this digital revolution.
Barriers to scaling AIOps
While technology and complexity changes rapidly, organizational challenges perpetuate the issues, including:
- Fragmented IT Operations: IT monitoring and operations teams sitting in organizational silos. These silos result in less than effective collaboration and an overlap in tool functionality. Data, legacy tools and analytical insight are not shared across individual IT operations teams.
- Growing Data Complexity: Digital transformation and big data have increased the amount of data and created multiple sources of data. IT silos leave teams with less than robust analyses for business decisions, unable to tap into all the available data and assimilate to provide a complete picture.
- Inconsistent Delivery: Operations teams continue to be reactive and respond to the increasing volume of incidents. Service delivery varies with noise, false alarms, etc. on the rise, making it increasingly difficult to be proactive and provide focus for teams.
- General Lack of Visibility: IT organizations are unable to link data across infrastructure operations, limiting the ability to assess critical services, understand dependencies, proactively detect abnormalities and identify probable causes of incidents.
Implementing an AIOps strategy
AIOps is being brought up more and more every day as the solution to all these challenges, with many vendors latching onto the term for marketing purposes. Many “next generation” monitoring platforms are claiming to be “AIOps.”
While platforms certainly are part of the solution, including ServiceNow, Splunk and Moogsoft, AIOps is not a platform. It is a strategy – a “state” to achieve as part of an overall digital transformation.
The promise of AIOps is ambitious. It can be a game changer for organizations that use technology as competitive differentiators, driving economies of scale and increasing customer loyalty. If planned and implemented well, AIOps can lead to improved business outcomes, timely and proactive responsiveness, and a highly nimble, unified IT organization.
However, AIOps will require a comprehensive re-examination at organizational structures, processes, tools, and the function architecture of your IT ecosystem. A significant investment will be required in reporting and analytics, automation, service management, service availability, integration and data collection.
The most important factor in the AIOps evolution
It will require leadership, vision, and commitment. AIOps will take time to execute – think several years, not months. For most organizations implementing AIOps, their teams are still in a Reactive or Integration mode. With the right strategy and partner, organizations can move to the more advanced stages of AIOps maturity, where IT organizations shift AIOps to being in an Analytical , Prescriptive and eventually Automated mode.
AIOps is not an event, but an Evolution.
Learn more about AI for IT Operations and how to launch your AIOps strategy.
