Johannesburg, 18 Apr 2019
The IT operations management market is a mature one that is evolving quickly. Organisations are looking for more efficient ways to deliver IT operations management. They want to break away from the traditional annual licensing and upgrade model, as this means they are generally two years behind the software that's coming out of the factory. They want solutions that are agile and based on a DevOps model, as they've become accustomed to having continuous delivery on other software that they routinely use, such as applications on their mobile phones.
Kevin Leslie, global sales and business development director: Service Management Automation at Micro Focus, says: "We're not just talking about IT service management; today's businesses want to consolidate all of their systems from all of their divisions onto a single platform; it's no longer regarded as a purely IT function or system. Today's organisations want a knowledge system that can deliver enterprise service management that encompasses IT, human resources, finance, facilities management and other divisions."
He cites an example: "Which division in an organisation is responsible for providing information around the General Data Protection Regulation? Is it the IT department? Legal? Even possibly marketing? If you implement an enterprise service management environment then users can find information around something like GDPR, regardless of where in the organisation that information resides and without being pushed from pillar to post."
The ability to bring service management and operations management staff closer together and to enable a larger degree of self-service will reduce the number of tickets to the service desk and improve customer satisfaction by enabling faster and more efficient resolution.
An integrated and automated approach to service management has clear business benefits, says EOH Application Management's ITOM product manager, Chris Visagie. "Instead of just being able to report issues, they'll have the ability to manage what's happening, predict some events and even automate the necessary remedial actions in some instances."
The incorporation of robotics means some simple tasks, such as resetting a password, can be performed automatically, while other, more complex tasks, are escalated to a human. "This type of true hybrid environment can significantly reduce the time spent on manual tasks by the user community," says Visagie.
He explains the benefits of using a cloud-based solution: "Moving clients from on-premises software to using solutions provided in the cloud as a service means that clients don't need to invest in hardware or install software, they just need to know how to use the application and let the service provider take care of the rest. It also facilitates the roll-out of the solution to other branches and even other countries, as it means that once people are trained on how to use the application, they're immediately up and running. It also means a single licence fee for the client. The business now consumes the service instead of owning it outright."
All too often, organisations have different technologies in different divisions and in different countries that all do variations on the same thing. This can result in a degree of complexity that includes a lot of manual processes with very little integration and no end-to-end life cycle management. It makes good business sense for them to consolidate these solutions across the business and get an end-to-end view of their activities.
Not only can they decommission all of the legacy software and stop paying annual licences on it, by migrating to the as a service model, the business can get enterprise-wide service management functionality that includes additional capabilities like big data, analytics and machine learning. Visagie says: "The business can see at a glance where some of the biggest potential problems are located and automate the processes required to prevent the issue from occurring. Sometimes businesses think that they don't have automation use cases, but they really do. They just need to understand the process behind the issue in order to automate its remediation."
The ultimate goal is to automatically remediate an incident before the end-user can be impacted by the event. "All incidents that are being reported into your service environment, whether they originate internally to the organisation or from the external end-user community, all take up human time to resolve. The ability to automate this process and therefore decrease the amount of time that it takes to resolve an incident is significant for any business. For this reason, it's essential to continually expand the footprint of incidents that can be resolved automatically without human intervention."
For more information, download this white paper on Fast-Track Enterprise Service Management Applications with Codeless Configuration and this white paper on Operations Bridge.