Technology is the catalyst that propels business innovation. It’s the means of ridding inefficiency, delay, and inconsistency from business processes. Technology is the essential element of success for virtually every business in every industry. That’s why technology excellence ranks at the top of every business leader’s list of priorities.
Maintaining the level and quality of technology service you need to be competitive comes with many challenges. Organizations must continually iterate application and product development to find the breakthrough capabilities that can give them an edge. That pressure inevitably leads to a constantly growing volume of change tickets.
Many service and operations teams are out of sync. They’re locked in functional and informational silos that inhibit effective collaboration. As a result, the employee experience suffers, risk increases, and organizations lose their ability to compete.
3 ways to unite technology service and operations
In essence, organizations need to unite technology service and operations in a way that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts. For a growing number of businesses, that starts with a single cloud-based platform that streamlines and optimizes processes for incident, problem, and change management.
The platform should address IT operations needs in the areas of discovery, business service definitions, visibility, and mapping. At the same time, it should support DevOps teams to increase change throughput while minimizing risk and overhead.
How can companies achieve a level of excellence where technology is an enabler of transformation and not a barrier to innovation? Here are three ways:
1. Automate and optimize service operations
More businesses are waking up to the need for a digital-first strategy. That means tech leaders have to manage the surging demand for technology services. Timeworn best practices aren’t much help in tackling demand spikes.
Instead, innovative companies are deploying advanced capabilities in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to manage the growing workload. They’re using technologies such as virtual agents to resolve routine service requests. Capabilities such as automated service mapping help provide a more reliable context for ops deployment and troubleshooting.
2. Reduce hardware, software, and cloud costs
Technology may be the springboard for innovation and competitive advantage, but tech leaders don’t have unlimited budgets. They’re under pressure to reduce technology spend. A unified, cloud-based platform can help by providing a single pane of glass that allows IT to view and maintain any IT asset (software, hardware, and cloud-based apps) on premises or in a hybrid cloud.
When organizations can manage IT assets from the same place where they plan, operate, service, secure, and retire IT infrastructure, they can maintain the control and discipline that keeps costs in check.
3. Transform security operations
The scope, sophistication, and frequency of cyberthreats keep growing. Manual processes, poor communication, and the inability to share data and coordinate resources and responses dramatically increase the threat of disruption.
A single platform that facilitates AI-driven, automated workflows and intra-departmental collaboration can help organizations anticipate, prevent, and respond to threats fast. Combining IT security, risk, asset management, and ITOps on a unified cloud platform provides a single source of truth for end-to-end visibility of threats. It also empowers security operations teams to cover an expanding attack surface and improve resilience.