Extreme IT agility is the antidote to business disruption

Futureproof your ITSM Extreme IT agility is the antidote to business disruption

02Futureproof your ITSM

The question is: How do these support business transformation?

Success requires a clear line between these new tools and desired business outcomes. Otherwise it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing on new technologies and methods instead of building the specific capabilities that your organization needs to innovate and grow.

Doing the thing right can take over from doing the right thing — causing misalignment between IT and business. To counter this disconnect, commercial and technical teams need to line up behind a shared mission:

Equip the organization with the tech-driven capabilities it needs to thrive in the digital age — where extreme agility is the only antidote to disruption.

Agility requires two attributes: the ability to quickly sense a change or opportunity, and the ability to rapidly respond with an immediate acceleration (do the same, faster) or change in direction (do something different).

Modern ITSM technology and practices can help you build the speed and agility your organization needs to transform into a digital-ready “future enterprise”— capable of creating disruption (instead of suffering it). In today’s ultra-fast digital age,

modern businesses need two “super-capabilities”: Awareness and Acceleration.

Thinking about ITSM in 2021 and beyond, it’s natural for technical people to focus on the technology and framework aspects:

• How new tech expands what can be done: AI, Machine Learning, IoT, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Big Data, blockchain, drones, VR/AR, and deep analytics.

• How new practice improve how it gets done: ITIL 4, COBIT 2019, Lean, Agile, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and others.

Executive Summary

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Technology is the Enabler

Technology is a key ingredient in the formula for agility. It can give your organization crystal -clear visibility of what’s happening (and what’s likely to happen), so you can make better decisions faster. It also helps you accelerate the launch of new innovations by giving developers the tools and resources they need.

How Can We Make It Happen?

In practice, IT organizations will need to do two things:

1. Build and support a more flexible service portfolio that tracks business demand more closely. That service portfolio is likely to include technology services like big data analytics tools that provide insights to executives, and DevOps tools that make development exponentially faster.

2. IT needs to service that demand through a more efficient and scalable digital model - using self-service and automation to swap the old “take a ticket and wait” model for instant digital access. IT needs to make access to technology a core part of the digital workplace, giving employees 24/7 access to self-service tools - instead of non-scalable gatekeeping of expert-only tools. After all, information technology is about spreading value far and wide to gain the greatest Return on Investment (ROI).

assyst is easy to operate and maintain with drag-and-drop service design.

Tough competition means organizations must be increasingly on-point on strategy and more effective in execution. No industry is immune to disruption. The only success strategy is to proceed at speed in the right direction.

To do this, you need awareness and acceleration. These are key attributes that define an agile “future enterprise” that is ready for anything. When you have these attributes. You can spot and seize opportunities before the competition.

Awareness and Acceleration

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Digital transformation is different for each organisation. However, here are some typical digital-driven transformation scenarios to illustrate how better awareness and acceleration can be achieved with new technologies and practices:

These capabilities help organizations gain the awareness and acceleration they need to be prepared for anything. Modern ITSM tech and practices are critical to developing agility. It’s in the ITSM world that we find practices that help coordinate change across IT and the business—in a rapid but controlled manner—as well as operating and adapting these innovations as an optimized portfolio of services.

What does digital transformation look like?

Awareness Acceleration

Democratising Analytics

Bring big data and analytics tools out of the lab and into the hands of business managers. Let them uncover insights and make datadriven decisions, faster.

Force Multipliers

Thread AI and Robotic Process Automation into business processes to replace manual labour, accelerate operations, and eliminate human error.

No Blind Spots

Bring big data and analytics tools out of the lab and into the hands of business managers. Let them uncover insights and make data driven decisions, faster.

Value-Oriented Working

Use agile/DevOps methods to add visibility to R&D and accelerate value-delivery, while cutting risk of delivering the wrong thing.

Challenge: IT Misalignment

IT teams lack clarity around what they do for the organization, making it difficult to align what IT activity with business priorities.

Solution: Service Portfolio Manageme

Managing services as a portfolio makes is easy for IT to see what IT does—and keep service offerings aligned with business needs. Our assystIT management solutiongives customers tools to manage an agile service portfolio that tracks business demand. New services can be brought online more quickly to make sure IT is powering business productivity.


What does Digital Transformation Look Like?

Blind spots are a business risk. Awareness is about knowing what’s going on: What’s happening now; what happened before; what’s changing; and what might happen next. Awareness is about knowing what to do next, and why. This means figuring out:

Organizations need sophisticated awareness to anticipate new customer demands and move confi dently in the right direction.

All organizations exist on a spectrum of awareness - from almost zero visibility to comprehensive awareness across customer interactions, supply chain performance and more. Leaders in organizations with low awareness maturity feel like they’re driving a car through fog, relying on gut instinct instead of data. Leaders in highly aware organizations enjoy 360-degree/20:20 vision and make confi dent, data-driven decisions.

Awareness

Awareness

What you need to do to catch up: neutralising innovations from competitors who got there first.

What you need to do to be overtake the competition and lead digital disruption: becoming the one that gets there first.

Challenge: See demand vs Supply

Your business needs better visibilty of its environment - and so does IT. Running IT as a buisness requires visibility of changing demands, service costs, process performance, and more.

Solution: Demand Management

Our assyst IT management solution combines a digital service catalog with process automation and reporting to give you better awareness of performance and changes in demand. With this digital platform, blind spots are eliminated, giving you confi dence that you are moving in the right direction.


Awareness

Digital Enables Awareness Integration is Key

Digital technologies record everything, creating mountains of data - allowing you to see what’s happening and predict what might happen. Data can be a rear-view mirror to examine the past, a microscope to clarify the present, and a crystal ball with which to glimpse the future.

The challenge is to get insight from such a large volume of data; compounded by the velocity, variety, and veracity. The rewards are sophisticated awareness and reliable, data-driven decisions which inspire confidence.

Data is the currency of business. For businesses like Google, information is the product. For others, like ERP, and ITSM, the product is a platform for data. The primary need is to bring data together. This requires integration—to pull data sources into one place to see the full picture.

Consolidation of data is a fundamental to awareness and acceleration because data is the fuel for both. Integration is a common need felt by businesses as a whole and individual functions within a business—from IT to Customer Service to HR and Facilities Management.

Challenge: Get 3600 Visibility

Awareness relies on aggregating data to provide information, knoweldge, and wisdom - on demand - to employees, business unit leaders, and executives.

This involves integration between point solutions and a master system (such as ERP or CRM). As a kind of business - within - the business, IT has the same need.

Solution: Omnichannel ITSM

Our assyst IT management solution is a master system for IT, drawing together ITSM, ITOM, and IT business management information in a single app.

Through simple, connector-based integration, assyst provides a complete view—eliminating the stress of manual data gathering and consolidation.


Awareness

True Awareness is Real-Time Consolidate to Integrate

The way we integrate is important. True situational awareness relies on realtime data elements, so systems must be integrated to provide fresh data in your central store.

Where it is enough to refresh the technical map of your IT environment every week or month, systems monitoring tools should provide you with real-time visibility of operational status.

Likewise—on the business side—real-time visibility of changes in customer demand is critical. For example, online retailers need to spot the “hot sellers” so they can adjust the supply chain and make the most of the demand.

Bringing data together can be a challenge. A fragmented tools landscape creates a fragmented data landscape. When faced with the challenge of integrating data from dozens of systems, people are compelled to simplify the problem by consolidating the tools landscape—sidestepping a tricky tangle of integrations.

Toolset consolidation can replace multiple point solutions with one app. This reduces integration complexity, direct license costs, and app management overheads. Consolidation is a tried-and-tested route to a leaner IT environment. The goal here is to enable awareness. Consolidation and integration are simply a means to an end.

Challenge: Get Real-Time Visibility

To make sense of changes to data as it happens, your IT management systems must be dynamically connected to your operational systems. Batch updates just aren’t fast enough.

Solution: Service Portfolio Management

Our assyst IT management solution is a single app built on a single data model. It’s easy to federate and consolidate data from multiple systems to gain a real-time view of your IT estate - using simple off-the-shelf connectors (all supported by us).


Turning Strategy into Execution...Fast

Acceleration is about building capabilities to get there fi rst because time-to- market is the key to success. According to Gartner, 80% of a new market’s profits are captured by the initial one or two entrants.

Data is Critical to Acceleration

Like awareness, data drives acceleration; speeding up business-as-usual and business transformation. At a basic day-to-day level, people need information to do their jobs. A warehouse worker needs a stock number and a customer address to dispatch a product. Faster access equals faster dispatch.

This is often the heart of the challenge for IT—inserting the right information at the right time into a business process so that people (or robots) can act more quickly. This is why an integrated view of data is critical.

AI is the Key to a Step-Change in Acceleration

Traditional if-this-then-that automation has hit a wall. Everything that is easy to automate has been automated. Nextgeneration automation uses intelligent algorithms to raise the bar of what is automatable.—allowing organizations to elevate themselves above routine work and commit more time to innovation.

New Ais can now be quickly integrated into business processes. For example, intelligent chatbots can now take care of mainstream interactions with customers, allowing customer service agents time to do their best work on the exceptions that require human intervention.

AI-driven services are the new frontiers of IT in the business, redefi ning employee and customer experiences, accelerating existing business processes, and enabling new process models which were impossible without AI. The challenge for IT is to fi nd the opportunities to accelerate every aspect of business—including its own IT operations.

Acceleration

Challenge: End the firefighting

When 80% of your team and budget are tied up in routine tasks and reactive fi refi ghting, you won’t have time to build and deploy the sort of game - changing IT solutions your business needs.

Solution: Service Portfolio Management

Modern ITSM technology introduces a step-change in possibilities for automation. For example, smart detect-andcorrect automations find and fix infrastructure issues at digital speed—before they impact service users—giving you a more robust infrastructure environment, and a seamless high-availability IT experience.


Acceleration

To Enable Business Acceleration, IT Must Accelerate Itself

In the endless pursuit of effi ciency, your competitors are not sitting still. As new technologies like AI, and machine learning evolve, new opportunities for IT to drive business transformation emerge. To keep pace with the continuous demand for innovation, IT must accelerate its own delivery and strive to achieve a state of continuous service innovation.

To create and maintain a competitive edge, IT must develop new capabilities to bring new IT services online faster. Business leaders are looking to IT to provide them with better awareness and acceleration. More visibility, more effi ciency, reduced cost, reduced risk.

In order to achieve continuous service innovation and improvement, IT must break free from the burdens of the past—where 70-80% of time and budget are spent keeping the lights on.

Automate Tasks to Ensure IT People Focus on High Value Activity

New AI capabilities can assist IT in its quest for transformational effi ciency. For example, chatbots can look after common support issues with zero human intervention, reducing call volumes by 30% or more.

AIOps applies machine learning to IT operations to automatically detect-and-correct infrastructure errors and negate risks well before they impact IT services; taking much of the strain off your network, datacenter, desktop, and database teams.

With much of the routine work of IT covered by automation, IT people are released to work on improving and extending the IT project portfolio and the IT service portfolio—enhancing the business value that IT delivers.

It is only through an “automate everything” approach that IT can transcend the mundane and elevate itself to be an innovation powerhouse—helping solve the hard business problems through the application of technology. This is the path to building a future enterprise—one that is ready for anything.

Challenge: Automate the mundane

AI and Machine Learning mean there are now many traditional IT tasks which IT people simply should not be doing any more. Assigning people to tasks which can be done by an AI is a form of waste.

Solution: AITSM

AITSM—the application of AI/ML to the ITSM sphere—automates a range of scenarios across ITSM practices: from automated assignment to root cause analysis; from to self-healing to knowledge curation.


Conclusion

A service catalog has the potential for transformation of the IT customer experience - while at the same time reducing the cost of IT operations and support.

Transformation of IT into a lean and agile innovation powerhouse is a prerequisite for sustained digital transformation of the broader business— because digital transformation is a continuous and ongoing process.

IT must power this digital transformation journey, which it cannot do if it is slowed down by a fragmented, legacy IT management technology toolset. Unifi ed IT management is the foundation you need to take advantage of new technologies more quickly.

Mature, modern IT service management software is a critical component, allowing your organization to better manage a portfolio of services which is both fl uid and expanding.

References

1. https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US45578619

2. https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/trends/documents/insights-2018-e-book.pdf

Unify IT with assyst. See all. Manage all. In one app."

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Extreme IT agility is the antidote to business disruption