devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: enterprise service management

  • How ESM Enables Digital Transformation

    How ESM Enables Digital Transformation

    The pandemic has forced organizations of all sizes to overcome colossal challenges and embrace flux. We’ve all heard stories about businesses having to adopt a new communication tool and train staff overnight, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

    Many companies are in the middle of fundamental transformation, enabling enterprises to create more business value quickly. Still, digital shifts can also highlight stumbling blocks—such as inefficient management of people, tools and processes.

    As modern business needs grow increasingly complex and require teams to do more with less, C-suite executives have learned that real value lies in customizable systems built for scalability, automation and collaboration. In the same way, companies have embraced DevOps to break down silos between development and operations teams, modern businesses are adopting enterprise service management (ESM) principles to create shared responsibility and opportunity across departments.

    This approach has helped businesses view their digital transformation plans in a new light. Forward-thinking leaders are using ESM to enable a DevOps mindset, to centralize knowledge and ensure efficient digital service delivery within their organizations over the last twelve months.

    The Business Benefits of ESM

    ESM includes the tools and processes that enable an organization to manage the entire life cycle of IT (or other business units’) services. At an organizational level, it can be considered analogous to service-oriented architecture rather than an application architecture level.

    Within larger organizations, multiple teams are often doing similar things to support different parts of the business. Keeping track of requests, prioritizing them and ensuring the right resources are available can be challenging. With ESM, companies can consolidate their resources and provide a consistent way for the organization to consume them. Akin to microservices, employees can easily access shared company services through a uniform interface, streamlining resources management.

    The approach encourages enterprise leaders to see everything the company does as an integral service to the entire business. So, rather than an accounting team merely existing to process purchase orders and take care of payroll, it becomes a service provider. For example, they might create a portal that provides templated service requests for everyday tasks, such as raising a purchase order or understanding if a payment has been received, and a mechanism for capturing ad-hoc work that isn’t otherwise defined.

    The real benefit of this approach is work management. A ticket is raised, and the department dealing with it can have a rotation of people, with whoever is least busy picking up the service request, assessing and resolving it or assigning it to someone else. That’s one reason it’s hardly a surprise that 87% of companies surveyed in 2019 said that they had already incorporated ESM in some way.

    Practices, Not Processes, to Optimize Digitization

    However, with businesses forced to undergo historic digital transformations over the last year, ESM has become even more valuable for organizations. The pandemic has shifted work management to a 100% digital initiative as teams were distributed remotely. A well-executed ESM strategy has enabled enterprises to take their digital-first workflows to a higher level, driving more value from employees and enabling organizations to scale service delivery and create unrivaled customer experiences.

    ESM requires businesses to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to service delivery and encourages them to replace their process-orientated mindset with an approach that focuses on value delivered through practices. These practices, which are built on user interaction and feedback, support agile organizations by helping them accelerate change and make services more available and reliable for customers.

    Furthermore, these practices put users’ pain points and needs front and center to ensure continuous improvement. Through frequent evaluation, enterprises can address the things that matter the most to staff and customers. While this might seem like a basic practice for any company’s digital transformation plans, the truth is in many cases, we’ve found the practice to be widely neglected. A recent report from Eagle Hill Consulting found that one-third of U.S. employees say their company’s technology either doesn’t help or makes it more challenging to serve internal and external customers.

    Digitization driven by these ESM principles can enable businesses to improve operational efficiency, reduce cost and risk, and plan strategically to support their evolving needs. All of these are, of course, what every organization had in mind as goals when the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to rethink how they do business.

    ESM Automation and Cross-Departmental Visibility

    At a high level, ESM sets out to bring all internal services into one place where every employee can easily find what they’re looking for in an instant. Accessing everything in one place also opens the door to leveraging automation. The option for automation means that some previously manual tasks – like providing access to systems – can be automated, speeding up wait times for staff or external customers and ensuring scarce resources, like your best people, are used more efficiently.

    Moreover, common, consistent and shared platforms for all with a single access method gives individual departments enhanced visibility and control throughout the entire organization. Historical silos hampered individual business units’ visibility and understanding of the functions their business provides or how they’re processed. A unified portal where all departments can access resources and receive requests, in the same way, solves that.

    Of course, this isn’t to take away from the inevitable learning curve that comes with digital transformations, especially at the size, scope and scale currently being undertaken. But the turnaround time from disconnected, slow, siloed teams to visible, open, speedy services far outweighs the effort required. In fact, recent research from Digital.ai uncovered just how badly visibility problems and poor internal alignment plagued businesses, with 56% admitting they’re worried that they’ll fail to achieve any return on investment from their stagnant digital transformation initiatives.

    On the other hand, industries like finance, which have upscaled self-service and automation significantly in recent years, have built entirely new business models with collaborative technologies, accelerated innovation cycles, and have learned to make better, faster decisions.

    These companies all embraced technology to empower their employees to help customers get the most from their service. In doing so, they are better able to deliver the best business value, which is core to a DevOps mindset and is achievable with successful ESM strategies.

  • Does it Matter That We’re Still Working in Silos?

    Does it Matter That We’re Still Working in Silos?

    Seventy-two percent of business leaders believe that cross-departmental working at the enterprise level benefits their employees’ experience and engagement. However, 68% of these same organizations admit to working in silos—the complete opposite of collaboration.

    So, there seems to be a conundrum. We know that working in silos is detrimental to our employees, customers and the business as a whole, yet, we’re still doing it.

    The question is: why?

    Our Protective Bubble

    To work in a silo means to build a protective bubble around you and your team, where nothing comes in and nothing goes out. It’s a zone of comfort, shielding your department from the rest of the organization.

    Siloed teams keep processes and knowledge to themselves. They work independently, for the most part, toward their own goals. By actively keeping themselves to themselves, they resist cross-functional collaboration of any type.

    As a result, those in the protective bubble are oblivious to the problems, processes, knowledge and successes outside of their immediate vicinity. Imagine what they’re missing! Someone from inside the bubble could have an idea that could solve one of an enterprise’s issues, or they may be the key to elevating an existing idea to the next level. But they’re in the bubble because they tend to feel overprotective of their work and that of their team–so forget about hearing those great insights.

    Silos Are a Hard Habit to Break

    The likelihood is that if one of the teams in your organization is working in a silo, then many others are too. And letting departments stay safe in their protective bubbles is far easier than rocking the boat and trying to change the way that several groups work.

    And once we have silos, they become part of the furniture. We build our routines and the way we work around them and suddenly they become ingrained in who we are, much like a bad habit we never intended to continue, but now cannot stop.

    This explains why we continue to work in silos despite knowing the detrimental impact they are having. A habit is hard to break. And even if we do start on the journey to change, it’s often easier to give up when the going gets tough than push through the problems. Take smoking for example; (one of the most difficult habits to break, sure, but hugely beneficial if you can do so) a 2015 survey found that only 7% of those who attempted to quit did so in six to 12 months. Changing ways of working has to be easier than that, right?

    Bursting Those Bubbles

    If staying stagnant and failing to grow or develop is more your thing, then, by all means, stay in your safe silos.

    But if becoming a more efficient, engaging, and effective business is important to you (which it should be), then you cannot expect to grow if all organizational teams are moving in different directions, not sharing their processes, ideas and insights. And much like quitting smoking cold turkey is a recipe for failure, expecting to diminish our silos in one day also is not a viable option.

    There is a solution that can incrementally burst those bubbles in a manageable and effective way: enterprise service management (ESM). Collaboration and communication are the main benefits of working in an ESM system; it provides organizations with one place for all departments to work in. Each team can set up and share processes, import knowledge and provide services through ESM.

    And by working in this unified area, departments are unconsciously collaborating. Teams can learn from each other, thanks to the universally available knowledge, and can share processes without even realizing it’s happening.

    For example, say the IT department is alerted to a printer fault in the ESM system. They first try to fix the defective item, but unfortunately, it’s not possible; they mark the printer as needing to be replaced. A notification is sent to the purchasing team asking them to buy a new printer; the order and delivery information then goes to facilities that will procure and fit the new device.

    Departments are able to keep their responsibilities and meaning, which was often their primary reason for staying siloed, while also being empowered to work better with their colleagues–and they don’t even have to lift a finger to improve the collaboration; ESM provides the space and the processes to do so.

    The Domino Effect

    The thing with ESM is, though, that we can’t just chuck all of our departments into the system at once and expect it to solve all our problems. We must implement it slowly, sometimes even one team at a time. But once we have freed one department from its protective bubble, it becomes the catalyst for something of a domino effect.

    It’s easy to work independently when everybody else is doing it, but the minute others start collaborating, it’s a different story. Imagine it’s a Friday night and you’re at home with no plans and all your friends are, too. It’s easy to be content with the situation. Now, imagine all your friends are out at a bar socializing and having fun instead, with all the pictures flooding your social media feed—the fear of missing out sets in.

    The same is true of siloed working. When we’re all in our bubbles, there is no organizational connection that we’re missing out on. But if we suddenly start to see departments collaborating and succeeding thanks to shared knowledge and processes, we want to be involved, too. And the more teams suffer from the fear of missing out, the more bubbles we’re bursting until there aren’t any more left.

    Stick or Break the Silos?

    It’s easy to unconsciously take up the habits of siloed working; after all, we thrive with our own responsibilities and a close-knit team. But it has to be a conscious decision to break down our organizational silos; it can be a long, difficult journey to do so.
    So, are you going to stick with the habit? Or find a way to collaborate and communicate better together?

  • AIOps in Service Management: Removing the Noise

    AIOps in Service Management: Removing the Noise

    AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT ops) refers to the automation of IT operations through AI and machine learning. With every organization working rapidly toward the ultimate goal of digital transformation, there is a natural place for AIOps within service management as a means to automate processes and automatically spot and react to issues in real-time. But what exactly is AIOps, and how does it remove the noise from service management?

    AIOps: Taming the Growing Complexity of IT

    Digital transformation has resulted in IT infrastructure complexity growing at an astronomical rate. The resultant increases in infrastructure data and alarms at the service desk far exceed the capacity of any human to meaningfully read, analyze and respond to them. The infrastructure itself is also constantly morphing and changing, yet service desks are still expected to resolve requests, incidents, and performance issues in seconds – an impossible task, given the volume of data.

    AIOps provides the necessary firepower to address this exponential rise in data, using artificial intelligence to continually monitor and analyze changes in the IT infrastructure in real-time. By combining these insights with service desk automation, organizations can benefit from a closed loop of discovery, analysis, detection, prediction and automation which, combined, bring us closer to the enviable goal of self-healing IT.

    Two Phases of AIOps Implementation

    The implementation of AIOps falls into two phases: discovery and analysis.

    Discovery

    The discovery phase involves uncovering all of the compute, network and storage entities across your ever-changing IT environment and ensuring your configuration management database (CMDB) is always kept up to date. But just knowing what is on your network is only the first step – you then need to determine how each asset relates to, or depends on, each other. This dependency mapping stage requires tracking of dynamic, multilayered relationships between applications and hybrid infrastructure, and creating rich, visual topology maps so that you can immediately see where dependencies lie within the network, and, therefore, where potential bottlenecks or risks reside.

    Analysis

    With your CMDB now kept up to date with automated discovery and dependency mapping, you now need to make sense of this data. After all, data is useless if you can’t use it to make informed decisions. By applying machine learning algorithms to analyze this data, AIOps can identify patterns, spot anomalies and predict future outages.

    Why AIOps in Service Management?

    AIOps has many benefits within the larger service management context. AIOps can:

    1. Support, not hinder, rapid digital transformation – with automatic discovery and dependency mapping, AIOps allow the business to continue to invest in new IT services without upsetting those in operations that need to keep the lights on.
    2. Reduce downtime – with automatic reporting of anomalies, operations can address potential issues before they result in a service outage.
    3. Automatically update the CMDB – An accurate CMDB is the foundation of successful IT operations. If your CMDB is out of date, then you are left trying to solve problems blindfolded. Just make sure your AIOps supports hybrid environments, so it can discover all IT assets from physical to virtual infrastructure, on-premises to public cloud, etc.
    4. Remove noise from the service desk – AIOps helps the service desk to overcome alarm noise and determine which events need their attention by eliminating false positives, performing advanced event correlation, reviewing time-series event playbacks and determining probable root cause.
    5. Actualize self-healing IT – no longer a myth or an IT operator’s dream, self-healing IT can be realized through AIOps. By automatically triggering actions based on the findings of the machine learning engine, AIOps can quickly fix issues or prevent them from happening, whether it’s a network link that’s gone down, an over-utilized disk or a service that simply requires a restart.

    Operations is not known for being a calm and relaxing environment in which to work. When your role is primarily a reactive one, there is rarely time to be proactive. You are bombarded with alarm bells and error reports all day long. How can you tell the difference between a false alarm, an isolated incident or the early indicators of a bigger problem? AIOps, leveraging machine learning, has finally provided IT operations with the tools needed to make sense of this growing barrage of data.

  • Enterprise Service Management with Jira Service Desk and Confluence

    Enterprise Service Management with Jira Service Desk and Confluence

    Companies are looking to reduce cost, create efficiency and improve productivity of all internal and external customer services. In many organizations, different departments are using individual tools to provide their customers with the services they need. They can work in silos, can provide inadequate quality of service and not to mention that the portfolio of different tools can be quite costly.

    Enterprise Services Management (ESM) is a popular approach to implementing services within the organization. Departments such as human resources (HR), operations and marketing are seeing the value of Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) processes, and companies are looking to repeat that same value across the business. ESM allows all departments in the organization the opportunity to standardize tools and processes across all of their services departments. This standardization of tools and processes can create transparency, can improve the customer experience and in the end can reduce overall cost.

    There are quite few tools that can be used to support the implementation of ESM. Two components of an effective ESM implementation include a shared service desk and a knowledge base. 

    The shared service desk encourages the standardization of tools, and even paves the way for the alignment of processes. Departments should find tools that can be scaled up from just ITSM to support requirements across different service departments. There are quite a few applications available to companies for a shared service desk.

    In order to promote adoption, organizations must consider the ease of usability for both customers and customer service providers. Atlassian has two applications, Jira Service Desk (JSD) and Confluence, that together provide companies their shared service desk and knowledge base components of their ESM solution.

    JSD can be used as the foundation of an organization’s ESM implementation. Having JSD as the standardized service desk provides customers with a single customizable portal for all requests across the business. Unlike Jira Software and Jira Core, JSD licensed users are called agents. Companies only pay for agent licenses and do not pay for their customers.

    Below are just some of the features that are available with JSD:

    • A portal that can organize request types for customers. This provides them one place to submit all of their requests across the business.
    • Customizable workflows that include features such as custom statuses, conditions and post-functions.
    • Queues that provide the ability for agents to monitor and manage requests.
    • Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that help set time frames for agents to complete a certain step such as responding to the customer and even resolving the request.
    • The ability to automate certain workflow steps.
    • A plethora of built-in reports, to include one that shows overall customer feedback satisfaction.

    The next component is a knowledge-base. Why is a knowledge base valuable to both customers and agents? Confluence is a wiki that helps teams organize and share information. A well configured knowledge base can empower the customer to answer the questions they have without submitting a request. This can reduce the time agents spend on common requests. 

    Confluence has the ability to create a knowledge base, and seamlessly integrate it with JSD. Confluence is organized by pages, which are structured in a series of parent-child relationships—in the end form it’s called a page tree. To add/edit articles in the knowledge base, the person will require a Confluence user license. However, any customer can read the articles in a knowledge base without a license.

    Below are just a few of the available features with a Confluence knowledge base:

    • Built-in templates for how-to and troubleshooting articles.
    • Page labels that help serve as keywords for customers and service desk agents when searching for knowledge base articles.

    Below is a process flow for customers submitting a request in a typical ESM implementation using JSD and Confluence:

    1. User launches portal in web browser.
    2. In the portal, if a knowledge base is configured, the user can start typing keywords to search for articles that answer their question.
    3. If the user does not find the answer to their question in the knowledge base, they can navigate within the portal to the request type they wish to submit. The request types can be grouped by department.
    4. User completes the request form. Fields can be custom or out of the box. They can also be required or optional.
    5. Form is submitted and it creates an issue in JSD. 
    6. The issue is added to one or more agent queues. Agents can also receive notifications in email, and third party applications such as Slack, Opsgenie or PagerDuty.
    7. Agent communicates with the customer via comments in the Jira issue, and the customer communicates with agents via the customer request interface.
    8. Agent works on request in until its resolution.

    In summary, ESM is continuing to improve value in organizations for many reasons. One part of a successful implementation of ESM is which tools are selected for customers and customer service providers.

    — Evan Golden