Johannesburg, 12 Jun 2023
When you merge service management and operations management, you get ServiceOps – a critical aspect of successful digital transformation journeys. But while many CIOs and IT teams are still trying to figure out how to embrace ServiceOps, some companies have completed successful deployments. Their success can be evidenced by their ability to remove organisational silos between service and operations management functions, open new collaboration channels, elevate experiences and boost productivity for teams across IT, product development, HR and more.
According to recent research by Hanover Research, commissioned by BMC, more than 60% of organisations surveyed say their top strategic priority for the next three to five years is to deliver successful innovations, which requires implementing intelligent services and operations capabilities, increasing automation, applying a DevOps approach and creating better customer experiences. The key to achieving this is using tools that support the better management and automation of complex IT operations and orchestrating application and data workflows across any hybrid environment.
Which, when you break it down, is exactly what effective ServiceOps sets out to achieve. That, and an improved employee and customer experience.
Key concepts of ServiceOps
The principles on which ServiceOps are built include popular DevOps and agile frameworks, such as user-centric actions, collaboration and cross-functional autonomous teams, end-to-end responsibility, continuous improvement and automation. The specific automation functionality referred to here is the autonomous functions within a ServiceOps platform that doesn’t require custom integration between service management and operations management capabilities. For example, BMC offers a seamless experience on its Helix platform, which delivers a host of added benefits and ROI compared to competitors. The deployment of ServiceOps using AISM (AI Service Management) capabilities is unique to the BMC offering.
With these frameworks, ServiceOps will enable service management and IT operations (ITOps) personnel with a seamless experience in using the same platform to trigger auto remediation automation from event correlation through to auto remediating issues. These teams will ultimately be able to deliver better services and manage change effectively in highly complex IT environments. It comes down to replacing reactive service and operations management models with proactive, intelligent and effective processes.
In practice, ServiceOps unifies people, processes and technology that depend on each other, enabling effective service delivery and incident-free infrastructure operations. The need for this has arisen from disruptive infrastructure environments and the failure of traditional standalone ITSM and ITOps strategies to keep up with user demand for dependable IT services.
Deliver superior business results
Understanding changing environments and the digital disruption caused by deploying and embracing new business services is a challenge we find best met head-on by deploying a solution like BMC Helix ServiceOps.
By marrying service and operations management with differentiated capabilities, our BMC Helix ServiceOps clients can protect their businesses from outages and slow performance risks. They can do this through the incident reports, alerts and data from operations and service requests correlated in BMC Helix ServiceOps.
Using the capabilities of AIOps is also central to the success of automated ServiceOps. With AIOps, an IT team can use pre-trained AI and ML models with observability data and service models to identify performance and root cause outages. This data can be used to view the services' health, highlight potential future issues and offer proactive resolutions. When this level of automation is built into ServiceOps, it takes a lot of the guesswork and pain out of receiving reams and reams of unintelligible alerts.
Personalising the experience
Another challenge with ServiceOps solutions is that, in many instances, they are viewed as unwieldy to manage. Let's consider that ServiceOps aims to eliminate information, knowledge, technology and organisational silos across departments and technology environments across the end-to-end ITSM pipeline – then they need to be user-friendly.
What is needed to ensure success is a solution delivered as a consumer-like, personalised service experience across traditional IT and business functions. For example, managing HR and customer service management through virtual agents, knowledge bases, live chat and tickets that make it easy for customers and employees to request and get help.
It’s critical to understand that ServiceOps works with the ITSM and ITOps teams, empowering them with the information, cultural mindset, technology solutions and framework designed for the modern technology-driven enterprise.
Using a converged platform
In short, we are helping our clients achieve all the above and more with BMC Helix ServiceOps. For example, a client with an IT incident that requires the ITSM and ITOps teams' attention will immediately be able to use the ServiceOps platform to view a unified interface supporting collaboration between previously siloed and geographically disparate teams.
It also ensures the unification of data and workflows throughout hybrid cloud environments and minimises manual, repetitive processes while increasing the speed to desired business outcomes. Teams now only spend time on proactive incident management and leverage AI/ML, intelligent automation and predictive service management to automate response times.
In conclusion, the power of ServiceOps lies in its ability to bring home the idea of collaboration across teams and systems through unifying information, workflows and processes. When effectively deployed, it delivers a unified service and operations management environment that will support whatever digital or cloud-based future your business needs to follow.
ServiceOps truly empowers ITSM and ITOps.
Share