IT Operations Management - the art of easy

By Joy Su

November 10, 2021

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Not all disruption is good, particularly when it comes to IT and service disruption. While technology adoption accelerated more than anyone could have predicted in 2020, so too have demands on IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM).

ITOM in particular is taking the brunt of this technology explosion. The sheer volume and frequency of alerts, the plethora of monitoring tools, and the resulting level of noise within alert monitoring systems have become far too complex to manage meaningfully. Somehow the technology designed to help the Network Operations Center (NOC) has become verbose and bloated with incident alert overloads.

Likewise, service agents are juggling multiple screens, running repetitive tasks and performing manual processes in an effort to resolve service tickets on the ITSM front.

The whole point of digital transformation is to accelerate the way we work, reduce errors and make the lives of our employees and customers better. Surely then, the focus in these IT tools should be on business outcomes and ease of use rather than simply IT outputs.

Noisy, expensive and repetitive

One of the main challenges with alert monitoring tools is that they keep pushing multiple notifications for the same issue every few seconds or minutes. This creates too much noise in the system, which detracts from resolving the problem at hand. For the overstretched IT resources of midmarket companies in particular, this makes it even harder to realize the value of many ITOM enterprise solutions.

With modern technology, all the noise, expense and complexity are unnecessary – especially important at a time when hybrid working and distributed teams are now the norm. Machine learning makes it possible to automatically comb through the data in real-time and apply rules and policies to prioritize what’s important. 

By combining incident response and efficient change management with AI-enhanced alerting, it’s easy for businesses to anticipate service disruption and intelligently minimize IT impact.

Targeted, easy and affordable

By automatically aggregating alerts in one place, NOC teams get a ‘single pane of glass’ to centrally monitor alerts from different monitoring tools. For example, one alert can produce multiple alert logs, resolving the problem of numerous, repetitive notifications. As not every alert requires action, you can create your own rules to say which alerts should be converted to incidents. That way the thousands of alert notifications can be distilled down to hundreds of alerts and then converted into a handful of actionable incidents – reducing noise and lowering the mean time to restore an incident or outage.

We think organizations should be able to use alert rules to route incidents to the right teams, tailor on-call schedules, allow very diverse teams to collaborate on the same platform and include the full context on the incident page to make things easy and bypass lost time. The addition of automation and AI is the perfect antidote to overworked and under pressure IT departments.

It’s typically been too much of a financial stretch for smaller, midmarket companies to afford sophisticated solutions, but the combination of ITOM with ITSM capabilities have now made these capabilities much more affordable. This is a gamechanger for midmarket organizations who can now manage incident response on a unified platform with the power of a modern solution and the intelligence of AI.

For years, the mid-market has been regularly overlooked and continually underserved by costly, complex third-party software. As I said earlier, not all disruption is good, but in this instance, introducing easy, modern, right-sized options for smaller companies is disruption at its best.