How To Improve Your Business IT Operation: What You Need To Know
This article examines some interesting insights about the challenges and opportunities that the enterprise IT operation teams might be facing today.
The Importance of Customer Experience
Best case user experience is the top priority for IT operations in any business. The Covid 19 pandemic has made business organizations speed up their digital transformation initiatives and many business activities are now taking place via digital channels. This translates to an even more important requirement that business systems must be up and running at all times.
Organizations are trying to facilitate seamless end-to-end experiences across many online channels, offering their end-consumers a pleasant experience expected. Furthermore, these days, when working from home has become the norm for many of us, business needs to pay attention to their employees and ensure they have the digital tools needed to be productive.
Incident Management is Critical
Driving a business toward seamless experiences requires a near zero-incident approach.
For starters, even though businesses are shifting to the cloud, many still have their entire systems operating across different environments, including private cloud, public cloud, and legacy systems - heavily involved in the end-to-end customer or employee experience.
Each environment has its own monitoring system. Thus, it’s critical to determine which alerts to deal with first, and the operation team needs a platform that outlines the impact of each technical issue, both internal and external so that they can prioritize their incident management work. 
Organizations should also revisit their monitoring approach, with the ultimate aim, of transitioning from traditional reactive monitoring toward predictive capabilities.
Being able to proactively detect and resolve issues before users are impacted, is a great initiative to make smart decisions and increase efficiency.
Some organizations also allow self-service capabilities, enable end-users to resolve several technical issues independently, allowing a faster and more seamless experience, at the same time enable a decrease in operations costs. Automating technical incident management also frees up time and resources for other important tasks such as innovation.
Collaboration is Key
Many business organizations are investing in Automation and Advanced Analytics, yet, some do not achieve the results as expected. The reasons may lie in the collaboration and planning within the organization itself.
Also, disappointing outcomes may derive from an inefficient collaboration between IT and other business teams.
There are circumstances, where IT teams make significant investments in data and analytics tools, before looking for business problems that need to be solved with such an analytics solution. That is somewhat backward.
Thus, the IT team should first try to work with other departments to identify the key business problems and then look for the technology solutions to address them.
Collaboration is needed not only between IT and business teams but also within the IT department itself. This is because modern IT operations require strong collaboration among the teams (e.g. DevOps, Network Engineers, Developers, etc.) to drive process efficiency and better availability of services.
In order to achieve such a desired result, teams need better communication and more efficient ways to share information.
Moreover, when it comes to digital transformation, teams mustn’t ignore data. AI solutions and/or advanced analytics are only as effective as the input data. To unlock the maximum value of transformation, businesses need to invest in bringing together all the data scattered across different functional offices, on a suitable platform with relevant ownership and accountability.
Leverage Data
Again, as mentioned before, a key to improving IT operations to become more efficient is to align IT with business results, such as increasing revenue and improving customer satisfaction as well as incident management. To accomplish such goals, every team across IT needs data-driven insights to accurately monitor and measure customer experience and provide the business teams with reports for future actions plan.
By leveraging data, teams across IT can quickly discover and resolve issues that are threatening to the system’s availability and performance. Advanced analytics may also be applicable to identify hidden problems and take care of them before they become apparent.
Data can provides visibility which improves collaboration between Devs and Ops Teams, allow IT operations to successfully drive digital transformations, which include cloud app modernization, and applications roll-out.
Focus on business needs, and not just technology
Many companies have fallen into the wrong track of focusing too much on the technologies rather than on the key business problems that can be solved by technologies.
With many new software development capabilities being introduced to the market, this can cause companies to invest in the new solutions without first considering how those solutions can be adapted to their consumers’ needs and miss out on the opportunity to generate new and additional revenue streams.
One Step At A Time
Digital transformation is indeed necessary for business, however, choosing to tackle everything at once could be a recipe for disaster. Instead, the operations teams should identify the business problems that need to be solved to work on first.
Building a fully operational integrated solution requires a lot of resources and work - where some old legacy systems may need a complete modernization or replacement. For example, to improve the employee experience, organizations have to assess thoroughly how they currently deliver end-user services - ranging from the HR management systems to tickets services and resolution time, and so on.
Once businesses have successfully completed one area, they can leverage that success momentum to continue with the next initiatives.
Need help hiring IT professionals for your project? Contact Us Today.
