Designing IT operations to deliver incremental business outcome improvements

Enterprises are experiencing an unforeseen demand in agility and customer experience due to the pandemic. The unprecedented situation is driving IT operations to align and support the demand. This would need the current diverse set of IT services to be able to provide a “single quality of service” metric that can be measured as a business KPI, thus making all other supporting KPIs invisible with an ability to tune them in alignment to the business need. Such a support model requires a maturity that reflects in the Machine, Method, and Model, and can be referred to as “Integrated services maturity”. It can be derived using several models. The depiction below represents one such model.

And using the state of current maturity to “redesign operations” that can provide a “singular quality of service”. This redesigned operational framework known as Managed Integration Services Framework will use several techniques from structured data analytics to textual analytics, from several different sources, like ticket data, application support data, QA and

Testing data, architecture documents to derive the “AS IS ISM (integrated services maturity) of the environment”. Some of the areas to look for would be:

ITIL/ITSM integration to the CI/CD combined with Mean time to debug demonstrated in the Time to release
Service capacity, availability, performance reflecting in the business service MTTR, MTBF
Business service-oriented POD (platform of delivery) that can be seen in reduction of hops and being predictive and proactive which reflects in avoidance vs. incident.
Vertical vs. horizontal application architectures mostly seen in the adoption of cloud, both public and private, based on how cloud-native they are.
Existing skills in the operations that are in the form of full stack, infrastructure as code, reliability engineering skills.
Operational alignment in application workload influencing infrastructure and vice versa reflecting clearly in the ticket data.

The gaps in the above areas, combined with the organizational change appetite are then used to define a set of “Integrated transformation programs” combined with an application or business unit specific approach for incremental business service outcomes defined at the beginning, through structured as well as simultaneous changes in the machine, method, and model. This is illustrated in the diagram below.

This approach focuses on combining mutually supporting projects (as depicted in the diagram above). Cloud adoption, if not combined with DevSecOps, will impede the ability to provide a business process aligned service desk and empowering the SRE model will be a distant reality. Currently, they are driven in a silo by themselves and will have their own priorities and timelines. This approach is designed to be non-disruptive. The business units that are analyzed for this maturity can be treated with a unique personalized journey model (route 1, 2, 3) according to their current integrated service maturity and are transformed through the journey as depicted below

As depicted in the diagram above, this “Dual BAU model” is a continuous integration of services and deployment to a digital command center keeps happening as and when the applications reach the required integrated services maturity. This will be reflected in an execution model that would be making the necessary changes in the 3 M’s, which are the machine, method, and the model

Integrated digital command centers support the above model, where a dual BAU state driven by integrated transformation programs will be unique, in the sense that they are more than command centers. The following diagram depicts a sample framework for such command centers run by integrated service maturity based design principles.

In conclusion, this framework is built on data analytics using artificial intelligence and a machine-learning techniques. It is designed toward a journey creation for each organization based on the patterns that the data demonstrates. The integrated transformation programs clearly demonstrate the realization of the incremental business outcome improvements. This also drives the point of organizational change management that is needed for a true benefit to be derived out of any integration efficiencies and enabling business aligned IT have to be amalgamated as part of this journey. This execution model facilitates that.

Murthy Malapaka
CTO
Cloud and Infrastructure Services, North Americas

Murthy Malapaka is CTO of Cloud and Infrastructure Services, North America, at Wipro Ltd. Malapaka has nearly three decades of experience in the technology space and has held various technology leadership positions across application and infrastructure architecture domains, specializing in service availability and reliability. In his current role, Malapaka helps enterprises digitally re-architect their operations to run on multi-cloud IT environments

Designing IT operations to deliver incremental business outcome improvements

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