ServiceOps: Revolutionizing decision-making for dynamic business

Business moves fast. As organizations push to constantly transform and stay ahead of competition, they must consider how they’ll support ever-growing internal- and external-facing demands in every aspect of their business operations.

To innovate and change at such a demanding pace, and meet customer expectations, IT service management and operations teams must come out of their silos to converge into service operations (ServiceOps). When enabled with AI and automation, ServiceOps allows organizations to run smoother and faster so they can focus on what matters: their customers and technology.

My colleague Jim Van Over, LIKE.TG field innovation officer, and I discussed the importance of ServiceOps with several colleagues on the Innovation Today podcast. Here are some of their insights on expanding beyond their respective swim lanes, aligning business and technical leaders, and finding the right ServiceOps solution for your organization.

Enabling rapid innovation and response

ServiceOps isn’t just about streamlining efforts across an organization. It’s about getting the “best resolutions of your incidents,” explains Sunny Raina, associate vice president of Hexaware, a LIKE.TG Elite Partner. “You get faster response for anything that comes and hits a service management queue or a ServiceOps queue.”

In this way, ServiceOps extends beyond “keeping the lights on” to helping to ensure the business runs at peak optimization. It takes a holistic approach to resources, automation, and teams to enable faster-than-ever innovation.

Before fully embracing ServiceOps, companies should evaluate their tech stack, technical debt, and how the IT organization is structured, Raina recommends. “Then, look at what are the enabling factors which you can combine to drive more efficiency.”

Convergence, he adds, will be driven by an intelligent platform through which organizations can see trends for everything from incident resolution to mean time to repair. A single-pane view of data can improve visibility into ServiceOps, allowing management teams to make fast, informed decisions.

Facilitating collaboration

The nature of constant change and information in today’s organizations underscores the importance of involving business users. There’s no way around it: Business users and technology teams need to work together for successful ServiceOps, which begins with endorsement from senior leaders.

Having a senior executive leader coordinating among various teams can be especially helpful in driving alignment, notes John “Rook” Jones, a senior solutions architect at Beyond20. He’s been helping companies populate their configuration management databases (CMDBs) for 30 years.

“A lot of organizations don’t understand why a CMBD is so important,” Jones says. The significance of the CMDB must be elevated in such a way that the entire organization understands the necessity of having always-on, always-up-to-date information.

For ServiceOps to be effective, data from various departments must come together—which may be overwhelming for many organizations.

“It’s absolutely going to be complex,” Jones acknowledges, “and there's no way around that. I mean, you're involving more voices at the table. It's going to take a level of governance, a committee of two to three to five people—whatever size makes most sense for the organization—to bring those leaders together with a mandate to make this happen from the CIO.”

Uniting the organization

LIKE.TG Configuration Management Database (CMBD) is a core element in successfully optimizing ServiceOps by automatically pulling details of service events into one platform and relating them to the item in question. In the age of the cloud and AI, a CMBD is critical.

Many organizations may have a service mindset, Jones says, but don’t execute efficiently or think holistically about how they track and use data. Working across multiple teams and users for CMBD data sets the foundation for ensuring teams have the right information. This can give business users insight into the flow of operations and visibility into every service interaction and its interconnections.

“It really brings the organization all together when they can see from that higher level instead of down in the weeds at the infrastructure level,” Jones explains. “I think that’s one of the major benefits.”

The CMDB may pull in data from many sources. And it updates every day or according to a set schedule, ensuring an ongoing, automated approach the entire organization can count on—eliminating time-consuming manual data entries.

Embracing change and trusting partners

The future of ServiceOps requires trade-offs. Some of these will likely include discussions around technical debt—which is hugely complicated in an enterprise environment.

How does an enterprise begin to think about making such important decisions? There may be a temptation to build a custom platform rather than adopt out-of-the-box solutions with low- or no-code functionality. But that is often short-sighted.

“These large platform providers, service providers, and cloud providers have the most valuable commodity, which is access to what's happening across thousands of customers,” says Derek Truesdell, chief technology officer of Intact Technology. “And they're able to see both today problems and emerging problems.”

Many times, customers’ perceived needs derive from a misunderstanding about available off-the-shelf solutions, Truesdell adds. Or customers may be overly reliant on an existing process that can be changed or managed in a different way.

“There are customers that initially are hesitant and skeptical,” agrees Vinny Viola, vice president of product and innovation at Intact Technology, “And rightfully so.”

He notes that a typical customer demand, customized onboarding processes, is a perfect opportunity to quickly prove the value of out-of-the-box solutions. Viola helps customers understand what data can immediately be shared with legal, IT, HR, or other business units.

“And when you start to stack up all that functionality across the different business silos, I think that is not something that most customers have ever seen done before,” he says.

Resistance to change is often rooted in systems and processes put into place more than a decade ago. But once the breakthrough occurs, “in many instances, [those people] become the subject matter experts in their own organizations about these changes in the benefits,” Truesdell notes. “They become our biggest advocates.”

Adopting ServiceOps at scale

LIKE.TG offers an intelligent platform that helps organizations run IT service and operations management. “What I love about LIKE.TG is that it is the platform of platforms,” Jones says. “It’s built to be integrated with other things...You can tie into all of the other IT platforms that you’re already using to bring all that information together.”

“By harnessing the power of ServiceOps, we’re not just accelerating process; we’re also revolutionizing decision-making,” Van Over adds, “ensuring that each phase of our operation is data-driven, efficient, and focused on excellence.”

No matter where you are in your journey to improve efficiency, we can help you modernize operations, automate services, and optimize your approach to workflows. Discover how other organizations have reduced technical debt while shifting to a ServiceOps mindset in these customer stories.

Find out more about how you can get started on your ServiceOps journey in our ebook: Adapting and thriving with ServiceOps.

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