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4 benefits of combining ITSM and ITOM
IT management can be costly and time-consuming without streamlined processes and systems to support your business goals. With the quickened pace of business requiring faster scale, leaders and decision-makers must find ways to adapt and optimize their processes.Combining IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) can help you prioritize operations efficiency while delivering the best service to your employees. ITOM helps keep your business running smoothly while ITSM helps keep your employees happy with timely and excellent IT service.Discover four benefits of combining ITSM and ITOM in these LIKE.TG webinars:A single source of truthWellStar Health wanted to optimize its operations to deliver world-class experiences for both customers and employees. In our WellStar Health overhauls their CMDB webinar, learn how a single source of IT truth helped the organization save 26 days in root cause analysis and decrease mean time to repair (MTTR) by 25%.Eliminated silosAs company demands continue to increase, shifting from legacy IT tools to the cloud can keep your business running smoothly. LIKE.TG Predictive AIOps, part of ITOM, can help you automate issue identification and reduce MTTR to achieve your targeted key performance indicators.Watch our Breaking down the siloed web of legacy IT tools webinar to learn how to empower your IT team with a single cloud system.Enterprise visibilityDo you find your IT management is costly, chaotic, and inefficient? Adopting a cloud system that spans both ITSM and ITOM can help you gain quick results and lower incident rates.Watch our Gain visibility across the enterprise with ITSM and ITOM webinar to learn how ITSM and ITOM can help you drive down costs and stay competitive.Automated IT service deliverySpeed and agility are crucial in today’s marketplace. As businesses continue to innovate to meet the needs of both customers and employees, shifting to one platform for all IT management can help you keep up with demands.Check out our Automate IT service delivery webinar to learn how you can scale your IT needs and reduce outages.Managing your IT systems doesn’t have to be difficult. Combining ITSM and ITOM in a single cloud platform can help you be more proactive in executing your business operations.
LIKE.TG to acquire Swarm64 to support the world’s largest workflows
In just the last two years, LIKE.TG has doubled the features and functionalities of the Now Platform to manage larger, more complex workflows for the new world of hybrid work. As demand for digital transformation grows, so do expectations for effectively leveraging data to create highly personalized experiences for customers and employees and to unlock productivity across the enterprise.That’s why we’re excited to announce that LIKE.TG has signed an agreement to acquire Berlin-based Swarm64, a leader in database performance and scale. With Swarm64, LIKE.TG will help customers more effectively and efficiently manage data across many different use cases to execute complex, high-speed data analytics at a mass scale.
Customer environments have experienced an explosive growth in data volume. Swarm64’s expertise in database performance and scalability allows us to plan for the future by helping us deliver increasingly larger and more intelligent workflows for our customers.Helping to future-proof the Now PlatformToday’s digitally transformed organizations require a hybrid database model that leverages both transactions and analytics in order to deliver intelligent workflows. But obtaining insights across the enterprise means simultaneously handling high volumes of data transactions and running sophisticated analytics with AI and machine learning models.Swarm64 was co-founded in 2013 by CEO Thomas Richter with a team focused on one mission: to accelerate PostgreSQL database performance. Swarm64 offers a combination of the analytical and transactional database capabilities that support large-scale, intelligent workflows and enable best-in-class performance and scalability for our customers.The combination of LIKE.TG and Swarm64 means customers can query more data sources faster than ever, significantly expanding the scalability of the Now Platform.In addition to bringing new database talent to LIKE.TG’s engineering ranks, the acquisition of Swarm64 signifies LIKE.TG’s latest investment in open source. Swarm64’s open-source-based database technology works extremely well for large-scale datasets, ultimately helping customers obtain the enterprise-wide insights needed to handle high volumes of data transactions and run sophisticated analytics in real time.Querying more data sources faster is a game changer in our efforts to make the future of business more productive and efficient. We’re thrilled to bring on board an outstanding team of database experts to help us meet the ever-evolving expectations and needs of customers as we set our sights on becoming the defining enterprise company of the 21st century.LIKE.TG expects to complete the acquisition of Swarm64 in Q3 2021.Update: LIKE.TG closed the acquisition of Swarm64 on Aug. 20, 2021. The Swarm64 team is now part of ServiceNow.Use of forward-looking statementsThis blog contains "forward-looking statements" about the expectations, beliefs, plans, intentions, and strategies relating to LIKE.TG’s acquisition of Swarm64. Such forward-looking statements include statements regarding future product capabilities and offerings and expected benefits to ServiceNow. Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward-looking statements. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make. We undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update the forward-looking statements. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward-looking statements include, without limitation, the inability to assimilate or integrate Swarm64’s technology into our platform; unanticipated expenses related to Swarm64’s acquired technology; potential adverse tax consequences; disruption to our business and diversion of management attention and other resources; and potential unknown liabilities associated with Swarm64’s business. Further information on factors that could affect our financial and other results is included in the filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time.
Go from reactive to proactive IT operations with AI
On your journey from reactive to proactive IT operations, you may be unsure where to start. If your organization is lacking visibility into your operations, that’s the best place to begin. Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can help you gain that needed visibility.AIOps and visibilityArtificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) offers numerous benefits, including faster response time, improved IT health, and simpler IT management. Most importantly, AIOps can help you stay in control of your operations.In our on-demand Now Book Club featuring AIOps webinar, a panel of experts discusses the AIOps Visibility for Dummies ebook. Join them to:
Get to know AIOps.
Explore AIOps use cases.
Find out how to increase operational efficiency.
Discover best practices for starting an AIOps journey.
Learn what to consider when implementing AIOps.
Automated IT asset visibilityAll too often, organizations have a disconnect between their service desk and IT asset information. As a result, unauthorized changes go unnoticed or the true impact of change on multiple services is misjudged.Automated IT asset discovery and service mapping can help improve your visibility and workflows. Watch our Improve your service management with automated IT asset visibility webinar to find out how. LIKE.TG IT Operations Management (ITOM) experts Matt Gowarty and Steve Emerson will walk you through ways to integrate IT asset visibility into your global work processes.Modern IT workflowsMany businesses fail fast as they try new things and rapidly release updates to keep up with their competition. But they need smooth-running business processes behind those changes. Employing AI to power your service operations can help you overcome both challenges.Learn how in our Modernize IT workflows with LIKE.TG AI-powered service operations webinar. LIKE.TG Principal Architect Christian Malone will share insights from others who have successfully used the Now Platform to build and scale their IT operations.
AIOps: Predict and prevent IT issues before they happen
In today’s highly competitive and volatile business environment, service outages can result in the loss of customers. Because of those high stakes, it’s imperative that companies take action to avoid outages. But how can you prevent them before they happen?Enter artificial intelligence (AI). AI and machine learning can run in the background to monitor systems and detect anomalies before humans can spot them. LIKE.TG Predictive AIOps was designed with this purpose in mind. It can help:
Prevent critical service outages.
Slash response time.
Focus on key issues.
Empower IT teams.
Adopting AI can be a big step in the right direction. These four LIKE.TG webinars can help you keep your business-critical systems running:Simplify IT managementNo company wants IT issues to impact their users or business. To keep that from happening, you need to simplify your IT management. Learn how Predictive AIOps helps those efforts in our Predict and prevent issues webinar.LIKE.TG experts will walk you through the transformative benefits of the product and discuss the expected outcomes of implementation. You can see for yourself how it works with a live demo.Go from reactive to proactiveFour common challenges often prevent organizations from keeping service outages at bay: the cost of data scientists and customization, limited understanding of telemetry data, lack of business service context, and the inability to take integrated actions.In our Getting off the AIOps launch pad webinar, Matt Gowarty, senior product marketing manager for IT Operations Management at LIKE.TG, discusses how to overcome these challenges and transform from IT operations from reactive to proactive. You’ll discover how you can predict issues before they happen, prevent impact on your end users, and automate remediation with cross-team workflows.Improve IT healthExcessive event noise, disjointed manual tools, and siloed operations can keep business-critical services from operating optimally. Yet, those are everyday occurrences. You need a way to improve the health of your digital services. AI-powered service operations and Predictive AIOps can help.Watch AI-powered service operations and predictive AIOps just got real part 1 to learn about the power of this combined solution. It can help your organization predict and prevent outages, reduce event noise and mean time to resolution, and help keep your digital services available and responsive 24/7.Glean insights from othersTake a deeper dive into the benefits of AI-powered service operations and predictive AIOps in part 2. In this session, LIKE.TG experts will walk you through industry use cases.Find out how Accenture transformed its IT operations management and went on to help other companies do the same. You’ll also discover how LIKE.TG implemented Predictive AIOps internally to keep our business-critical systems online. Glean takeaways to apply in your organization.
Technology excellence: The key to business transformation
Transformation. Everyone’s tossing that word around these days to the point it almost seems meaningless. Yet, it’s not. According to the 2021 EY CEO Imperative Study, nearly two-thirds of CEOs believe technology and digital transformation will have the greatest impact on the future success of their enterprises.In fact, 68% of these CEOs plan to make big-time technology investments throughout 2022. In particular, the study uncovered that increasing the use of artificial intelligence (AI) was one of the top three priorities for C-level executives seeking to propel organizational growth, followed closely by disruptive innovation.It's no coincidence that innovation is also a top priority because technology fuels it today. Yet, too often, technology hampers innovation. Too many organizations believe they need to settle for things working as they are, including archaic, legacy systems and a patchwork of processes. But trying to muddle through these resources is time-consuming and inefficient, robbing the organization of the time and means needed to drive innovation.Transformation requires excellenceThe key to innovation, transformation, and the explosive growth that can follow is what we at LIKE.TG call technology excellence. It’s driven by four business imperatives detailed in our Technology Excellence Handbook. These imperatives will create countless opportunities for IT teams to devote their time to what’s next and what can enable the enterprise to outperform the competition:
Automating and optimizing service operations for seamless, always-on technology services, no matter what comes your way
Accelerating software innovation across the enterprise through the at-scale adoption of leading-edge architectures and delivery practices
Transforming security operations to respond effectively to mitigate ever-changing security risks, despite increasing attack surface complexity, threat volumes, and skills shortages
Reducing costs and risks for software, hardware, and cloud resources by systematically managing the complete technology asset lifecycle
3 objectives that inspire excellencePowering those are three strategic objectives—the wind beneath the wings of the imperatives, so to speak. The objectives provide the reasons for executing on the imperatives and guide the technology decisions that will lead to the fastest and most effective business transformation. Let’s look at these objectives and examples of enterprises that have taken them to heart.1. Build a modern connected foundation and reinvestReshaping how your teams provide and enhance value can promulgate that value across the business—in all the fundamental IT and security functions the teams execute.Example of the objective in action: Accenture’s 624,000 employees can now access technical support via a single portal, consolidated from 15 legacy portals. Employees no longer have to figure out which department should handle their queries. They can resolve issues quickly, so they can concentrate on their important client work.2. Put people first by creating the best experiencesAs you enable extraordinary IT interactions for employees and customers, you’ll foster an environment of meaningful, imaginative work for your teams. At the same time, you can nurture your teams to engage in projects that offer boundless benefits to the business.Example of the objective in action: Finance of America users can connect to the service desk via the support portal, mobile app, or agent chat to get 82% of issues resolved on the first attempt and 50% faster than the industry average. Onboarding is streamlined for hundreds of new employees every month, whose requests are fulfilled 2.4 times faster than at comparable companies.3. Drive innovation through better technologyTo spur continuous growth, you need to equip all your teams to securely deliver leading-edge technology.Example of the objective in action: Cox Automotive customized a single LIKE.TG module to access software data and moved from zero to around 70% visibility of its assets, with 97% of software ownership and consumption data recognized. The company saved $150,000 in the first year by optimizing software usage.Find out more about how to achieve technology excellence in our ebook.
Lightstep Incident Response: Helping teams reduce downtime
Downtime—especially in customer-facing services—can cost businesses thousands of dollars an hour and incalculable customer trust. No company can afford to pay this price. To reduce downtime, software engineering teams must act quickly and decisively. But that’s easier said than done.With Lightstep® Incident Response, generally available from LIKE.TG today, we're unlocking speed, agility, and productivity for your engineers and your software-powered business.We hear from customers that site reliability engineers (SREs) and developers can receive up to 30,000 alerts a day, leading to massive alert fatigue and uncertainty about what needs attention. Cloud-native distributed architectures with tens or hundreds of dependent microservices increase complexity, making it difficult to determine the root cause of real issues, let alone resolve them.While triaging alerts and addressing incidents, SREs must work with multiple tools for observability, collaboration, on-call, and incident management. They must manually build the context of what is happening and involve the right responders to collaborate on analysis and resolution. Every second they spend toggling through multiple applications is a second further away from aggressive mean time to repair (MTTR) goals.Converting real-time insights into actionMore than a third of SRE organizations measure success based on improved revenues, profits, and customer satisfaction, according to a February 2022 SRE survey by IDC.1 Resilient software and services are a big part of that story.Without streamlined incident management processes and the required context, it can take hours for your developers and SREs to investigate and resolve unexpected issues. Pay-per-seat pricing for on-call and incident management tools makes it cost-prohibitive for all developers to participate in delivering reliable services.We’re on a mission to change that with Lightstep Incident Response. Our goal is to provide a cloud-native reliability platform that enables engineering teams to move fast and innovate boldly. Lightstep Incident Response is a crucial next step on the journey that started with Lightstep Observability. Combining real-time observability with incident resolution, Lightstep now provides teams the capabilities to deliver both innovation and reliability.
Powered by the Now Platform®, Lightstep Incident Response provides developers and SREs context and automation to pinpoint root cause and to streamline incident response workflow across observability, on-call and incident management, and remediation. This helps significantly reduce alert fatigue and decreases the pain of sifting through and resolving context-free alerts—resulting in less downtime, happier customers, and increased productivity.Extending observability across the organizationWith an innovative, usage-based pricing model aligned to the number of active services, customers can fully embrace the “you build it, you run it” culture of service ownership. The whole team can participate in on-call activities, collaborate on critical incidents, and learn from blameless postmortems to build more resilient systems without worrying about exorbitant pricing.The Now Platform has set the gold standard for IT Operations Management and IT Service Management and is used by many IT organizations for enterprise-wide incident management. Lightstep Incident Response integrates with the Now Platform so that distributed DevOps product teams can seamlessly stay connected with platform teams to deliver reliable and resilient services throughout the organization.Find out more about Lightstep Incident Response.1 IDC, US IT Quick Poll Site Reliability Engineering Survey, #US48859422 (February 2022).
IT Business Management becomes Strategic Portfolio Management
In today’s enterprise, technology is quickly extending beyond its birthplace in IT. Solutions that found traction with IT technologists are now helping connect everyone and everything at a company. At LIKE.TG, it starts with our customers.Customers have been using LIKE.TG® IT Workflows products in traditionally non-technology functions. Where these shifts became thematic, we listened and evolved our capabilities to serve those teams. For years, customers have been using our industry-leading IT Business Management (ITBM) products outside of IT. We’ve collaborated with them to ensure our products meet their needs.To better reflect our focus on enabling all organizations to plan, deliver, and track business outcomes across different systems, our ITBM products will now be called Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM).Connecting strategy and deliveryIn this era of constant change, what leading organizations have in common is agility. Agile organizations are better able to thrive in complex environments because they’ve developed the ability to spot business opportunities and threats early and to implement change quickly.LIKE.TG Strategic Portfolio Management can enable your business to move with agility, making the right decisions quickly and confidently to drive customer value faster. The product provides continuous, collaborative, and contextual alignment across every level of your organization.The unified data model and integrated digital workflows of the Now Platform® can deliver the insight you need to connect strategy, delivery, and business outcomes in a constantly changing world. With LIKE.TG SPM, you can ensure all stakeholders and investments are aligned to customer value, no matter what approaches your teams use to deliver work. You can also plan, adapt, and communicate your strategy and track performance in real time.Toward agile business“LIKE.TG’s shift to Strategic Portfolio Management as part of its go-to-market strategy is timely given urgent SPM demand with the challenges of hybrid work, increased complexity, and highly constrained resources,” says Melinda Ballou, research director for IDC’s agile application lifecycle management, quality, and portfolio strategies.“IDC sees SPM generally as a framework to help manage, prioritize, and optimize agile business and technology initiatives and innovation. Coupling process and organizational strategies with automation can enable systemic adoption and must be part of execution. IDC research indicates increasing adoption of agile metrics for businesses, which SPM can also enable.”Find out more about the benefits of Strategic Portfolio Management for your business.
How CIOs can drive innovation and empower transformational work
Today’s CIOs are like sports team coaches. It’s not enough for them just to prepare their teams for games and have a decent winning percentage. They’re expected to orchestrate imaginative plays that will make the most of a team’s talent and win championships.Out-innovating the competitionCIOs are on the hook for a lot more than merely adequate IT infrastructure. They must drive digital innovation for transformational results, enabling organizations to generate new, market-disrupting products and services—and do it faster than ever. They must do more than help their companies compete—they must deliver competitive advantages.“CIOs have a very business value-driven approach to the way they execute their job and speak the language of the business,” says Dan Higgins, global technology consulting leader for EY in a CIO article.“More institutions are putting senior IT executives onto the board as a steering mechanism for the C-suite. That has given the CIO a different voice at that level, but it also raises a different set of shareholder expectations of the role technology has to play in transformation.”Transform or go homeThe 2021 State of the CIO survey from technology industry analyst IDG supports this assertion. Nearly half (47%) of the more than 800 IT and business leaders the firm polled said their CIOs are “transformational.”According to IDG, these CIOs “cultivate enterprise-wide perspective and business knowledge, positioning themselves as trusted partners and strong collaborators with their function counterparts.” Additionally:
28% of CIOs are viewed as business strategists whose perspective extends beyond the walls of the enterprise and whose mission is to drive innovation for the future.
92% of those surveyed see CIOs as more innovation-focused.
89% of survey respondents recognize CIOs as the primary advocates of digital transformation.
Changemaker for the playmakersTo be the changemakers they’re expected to be, CIOs must drive four business imperatives in their organizations. These imperatives represent the fundamentals or foundational strengths and allow their teams to focus on inventive, trailblazing projects that will lead to continuous winning:
Automate and optimize service operations for seamless, always-on technology services that delight end users
Accelerate software transformation by safely fast-tracking advance development and adopting leading-edge architectures and delivery practices
Transform security operations by automating the collaboration of IT, security, and risk teams on data and processes for handling threats quickly and effectively
Decrease costs and risks for software, hardware, and cloud resources by systematically managing the complete technology asset lifecycle
One platform for the winWith LIKE.TG as a partner, CIOs can simplify this foundational IT with a single-platform approach. Watch the video to see a story about today’s expectations of the IT organization and the related challenges.The story recounts life before LIKE.TG and life with LIKE.TG—where IT service operations, software creation, cybersecurity, and IT asset management are streamlined on a single platform so IT teams can focus on transformational work that can deliver huge advantages in the marketplace.
The kind of day you can expect when you use all the power of ITSM
IT workloads and the demands for IT services are increasing in today's digital world as organizations rely more and more on technology services in the hybrid workplace. Among the challenges:
Costly service delivery due to systems and data that aren’t connected
A limited help desk staff that’s overwhelmed by more business-critical incidents and requests than ever, all of which need fast resolution
Subpar service experiences that often result from poor infrastructure visibility, manual processes, and uncoordinated responses
Don’t fret. You can vanquish these obstacles like the fearless and decisive IT leader you are when you get all of the awesomeness in the LIKE.TG® IT Service Management (ITSM) solution, including the power of artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, and analytics.Let’s join one of your peers, Adam, during his workday to witness the real-life value you can achieve when you use the ITSM Professional package and the ITSM Enterprise package.Efficiently handling routine requestsToward the start of his day, Adam checks in with the help desk team that uses the Virtual Agent in ITSM Pro to handle routine requests. About 85% of employees have adopted this self-service method, which deflects a significant number of cases. It also saves users 20 minutes per incident.Now Adam’s team has more time to work on higher-value projects, and they don’t have to answer the same questions repeatedly throughout the day.Consistently delivering high-quality servicesNext, Adam attends a process improvement meeting with his managers to see how Performance Analytics in ITSM Pro provides key data to help his teams proactively maintain excellent service.He learns there’s been a 60% reduction in the time to resolve critical incidents with a decrease in backlog cases by 70%. The team can focus on consistently delivering the best possible results while delighting employees.
Accelerating support for resilient servicesJust before lunch, Adam joins his colleagues from the development team for a DevOps governance review. He’s thrilled that DevOps Change Acceleration in ITSM Pro provides out-of-the-box integrations with development tools and pipelines to automate software changes and approvals.Adam is pleased to discover that both change requests and approvals take less than a minute each, speeding delivery of software his teams need to keep services running 24/7.Deftly handling P1 incidentsRight when Adam returns from lunch, he receives a P1 incident alert. But he’s not worried because Predictive Intelligence that comes with ITSM Pro uses machine learning to quickly identify, prioritize, and route these business-critical issues to the right team for rapid resolution.In fact, there’s been a 66% reduction in incorrectly routed incidents, and 77% of incidents are resolved on the first assignment to a team member. That means Adam’s team can avoid the bottlenecks from manual triage to resolve incidents quickly and use their time on work that drives innovation.Creating efficiencies and cutting costsToward the end of Adam’s workday, he huddles with his direct reports to drill into the survey data records with less-than-stellar customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. They use the Process Optimization app in ITSM Enterprise to see that resolution times for the hardware support team are longer than usual. Adam submits a process improvement initiative in the app to remedy this.This automated analysis process has saved his team four weeks of time this past year, as well as $30,000 on process consultation fees with third parties. Armed with complete visibility into process flows, Adam and his staff can instantly monitor and analyze performance, find conformance issues, and continually improve processes.Saving more than 100 hours a year, per agentFinally, Adam taps Workforce Optimization in ITSM Enterprise to review the performance of his application support team. Real-time coaching has helped the team exceed expectations and reduce training costs by 10%.At the end of his day, Adam is gratified to know the hardware support team members can achieve similar results. The team has reduced the time it takes for monitoring and reporting by 60% this year from this automated resource management.Adam can develop high-performing teams by optimizing schedules, work assignments, and work quality—all in one workspace. See what else happened in Adam’s day and get more details in this infographic.
Harnessing the power of the cloud to create personalized experiences
Technology teams are under more pressure than ever before. They’re balancing the demands of a changing workplace, growing customer expectations, and shifting from traditional to digital delivery. While managing more applications with less visibility, they face expectations to deliver fast, customer-grade experiences.These digital experiences are increasingly enabled by the cloud. Digital customer service interactions are expected to increase by 40% as more customers turn to digital channels and away from in-person services, according to Forrester.At the same time, these technology teams need to be product-focused, meaning they need to speed up the delivery of new products and services where the cloud plays a central role.Many enterprises have made significant strides in adapting and adopting technologies in step with the changing landscape. But there’s more that can be done to transform the world of work. To build seamless and differentiated experiences end to end, teams must adopt operating models that work faster, without sacrificing quality.Putting the cloud to work for youFrom harnessing the full power of your cloud to creating personalized contact center experiences, the right technology is key. With about 50% of all corporate data currently stored in the cloud, according to Statista, it’s clear many have already embraced the cloud. Now, it’s time to make it work for you. LIKE.TG and AWS can help.LIKE.TG provides a single platform to help monitor your cloud end to end—to accelerate application delivery and ensure services are operating at peak performance. With IT Operations Management (ITOM) and DevOps, along with Lightstep Observability and Incident Response, you can bring application resilience and performance to the cloud—identifying and addressing problems before they affect your customers.And, when customers need individualized attention, a personalized solution is just clicks away.Customers have come to expect tailored service that’s almost instantaneous, but it’s not always possible to provide immediate support with increasing call volumes and staffing challenges. LIKE.TG Cloud Call Center for IT Service Management (ITSM) and Customer Service Management (CSM), with native support for Amazon Connect, helps provide a seamless natural language experience. So, customers get the support they need, when they need it.
Why project portfolio management matters for digital transformation
Leaders around the world are moving fast to embrace digital transformation to achieve high performance objectives, including better financial returns, workforce diversity, and environmental stewardship. According to Deloitte, implementing digital technologies can help organizations accelerate progress toward these goals by 22%.What strategies are in place at your organization to ensure successful digital transformation to better compete in the marketplace? It’s not just a matter of money. There’s an element of planning involved with enterprise agility—and a multitude of projects and products in play at any one time.It’s a safe bet that project portfolio management (PPM) has a significant role in:
Improving project visibility
Keeping teams targeting the same goals
Helping teams make better decisions
Achieving project success
With such high stakes, it makes sense as an enterprise decision-maker to improve your understanding of PPM. That way, you can learn what tools are available today to achieve effective PPM outcomes and stay on track with projects to achieve digital transformation goals.Project basicsNo matter your job or industry, at the most basic level, projects refer to the work an organization engages in to change—and enhance—some aspect of how it operates. This could be streamlining internal processes and systems to save money and minimize risk, developing new products and services, or improving ways to market, sell, and support those new products and services.Thousands of business activities can be classified as projects that require various steps, carry high price tags, and need to be managed—hence, the rise of PPM.PPM and managing project resourcesThings change frequently in project work. One critical need is resource management: having the right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time. That’s difficult to achieve in a constantly shifting environment. With PPM, you can readily consider:
The resource capacity (the people available) you have for a project
Resource capabilities you have in the people assigned to a project
How resources are being used
Figure 1: Resource managementBenefits of IT business management softwareSpreadsheets don’t cut it if you’re trying to optimize PPM and resource management. This is where implementing an IT business management software solution can deliver significant value.An IT business management solution can help you effectively manage resources, plan the transition from one project to the next, and accurately forecast when resources will be required or released (see Figure 1).It also allows for optimal use of those resources and helps ensure the best possible return on the investment in them. Additionally, the solution can accurately tackle money management and improve project status reporting.Payoffs of PPMProjects exist to deliver enhancements to business operations and to make an organization run better. When projects are managed effectively and efficiently using PPM, your organization can have a higher chance of achieving your goals and objectives and optimizing value—particularly when it comes to digital transformation efforts.Learn more about PPM in our ebook, Project portfolio management 101.
LIKE.TG is again a Magic Quadrant Leader in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
I’m excited to announce LIKE.TG has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools for the second year in a row.This is an extremely important distinction for LIKE.TG and our newly named Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) offering. We believe this recognition reflects our expanded hybrid work management approach, financial management support, and extended integration with third-party tools.Strengths of Strategic Portfolio ManagementBuilt on the Now Platform®, LIKE.TG® SPM integrates strategic operations with development work in a single, unified experience. This unified planning and tracking solution offers a broad set of functionality, including:
Idea management
Prioritization of demands, epics, and features
Product roadmapping
Value stream management
Project and program portfolio management
In addition, SPM supports Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) implementations with epic and feature Kanban boards, product and value stream funding workflows, and remote program increment (PI) planning using a common board view.Agility and visibilityThe rapid pace of business today requires business agility. But many organizations are hampered by standalone tools that don’t communicate with each other. LIKE.TGSPM changes that, enabling organizations to close the gap between strategy and delivery to align the organization.Financial services firm Western Southern implemented LIKE.TG SPM to handle its full program lifecycle and enable better decisions and execution. “We wanted one place to capture, evaluate, prioritize, and execute IT demand, rather than working in silos across our business units,” explains Lisa White, a portfolio analyst at the firm.Centralized visibility has helped Western Southern prioritize demands, maximize business value delivered, and reduce project risks.German-based telecom company T-Systems adopted LIKE.TG SPM to replace its aging project management platform and integrate workflows across the business. Within six months, the platform hosted hundreds of projects and hundreds of users—all with a single view and real-time updates across the company.Continued innovationWe’ll continue to innovate SPM to make it better for organizations around the world and are proud to announce a new quarterly release model to deliver timelier innovative functionality.We’re not surprised by Gartner® recognition based on previous evaluations from other industry analyst firms, including IDC and Forrester Research. We believe these recognitions confirm our solution strategy is on track, rock solid, and working.Find out more about the benefits of Strategic Portfolio Management. Read the full Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ report.
What comes first: ITAM or configuration management?
IT asset management (ITAM) and configuration management are critical for IT modernization initiatives. Although both strategies provide guidance for tracking IT assets, their objectives are quite different.ITAM is about managing IT assets from a cost, risk, and value perspective. Configuration management tracks IT assets from an operational and support perspective.As organizations mature in their service management offerings, one question needs to be addressed: Should ITAM be implemented before configuration management, or should configuration management come first?Before answering this question, it’s important to understand the role of each discipline and how they work together to support service management operations.Managing IT assets from an operational perspectiveConsider the operations of an airline. If you book a flight from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia, you’re given a flight number. That flight number represents a service and is documented in the airline’s database that lists all flights offered.Flight numbers link to relevant information about each flight, including origination, destination, assigned crew members, gate numbers, gate agents, and the airplane itself. Any attributes related to the airplane, such as maintenance records and airplane configuration, are linked directly to the airplane—not to the flight number representing the service.A configuration management solution uses at least one configuration management database (CMDB) to house objects called configuration items (CIs). A CI represents a physical or logical IT element. This means a CI representing a logical element can be used to represent an IT service or a business service, in much the same way as a flight number represents a flight service.A CI that represents a physical entity is linked to hardware or software IT assets and contains attributes associated with configuration and status. A CI representing a service is typically linked to the CI(s) that represents the physical or virtual IT assets that perform the service.
From a mission or business viewpoint, configuration management provides stakeholders with a complete view of the organization’s service offerings and technology assets that support those offerings. From an IT and service management viewpoint, stakeholders are given a complete view of the IT infrastructure that supports service offerings, including representations that show how IT assets and IT services are aligned to the business or mission objectives.Configuration management is aligned with ITSM problem and change management workflows. It plays an important role in root cause analysis, and it minimizes downtime of services offered by an organization.If an IT asset supporting an IT service must be replaced, the CI representing that asset would be replaced, not the CI representing the service, like an equipment change performed by an airline. When an issue is discovered with an airplane, the plane can be replaced without impacting the actual flight number representing the flight service.Managing IT assets from cost, risk, and valueIf an airline decides to expand its services by adding flights to more destinations, decision-makers must evaluate asset inventory to see how many airplanes need to be purchased to meet the new requirements for operations.Although an airplane has an initial cost when purchased, it incurs additional costs while in operation. An inventory asset management database provides stakeholders with the total cost and associated risk of each airplane it has in operation, giving decision-makers data to inform future airplane purchases.Similarly, ITAM tracks IT assets from purchase to disposal—often referred to as IT asset lifecycle management. ITAM practices establish an accurate account of an organization’s IT assets, including the associated cost incurred throughout the IT asset’s lifecycle.ITAM uses an IT asset management database to document physical assets and then links them to associated contractual and financial information. ITAM is not just a software solution; it’s a strategy that requires an organization's internal acquisition and procurement processes to be clearly defined, enforced, and automated.By using workflows that increase control and enforce compliance to an organization’s acquisition policies, ITAM processes can reduce risk and cost. These workflows are typically aligned with ITSM workflows, such as IT asset requests, approvals, procurement, disposals, deployments, and redeployments. Workflows ensure IT assets are documented when they’re purchased and properly tracked when deployed.
ITAM provides stakeholders with asset intelligence by showing how IT assets relate to contracts, departments, cost centers, vendors, warranties, usage, security posture, compliance, availability, and location.Lost or stolen IT assets with sensitive data can result in a reputational nightmare for your company. When integrated with network discovery tools, ITAM solutions can decrease an organization’s security risk, notifying security administrators about unauthorized or unknown IT assets that join the network. Alerts can also be generated if an IT asset doesn’t report into the network for a period of time.ConclusionRolling out ITAM before implementing configuration management could simplify configuration management implementation by providing decision-makers with an accurate account of all the technology in their possession. However, without configuration management in place, the performance and reliability of an organization’s business or mission services is at greater risk. Changes introduced into the environment will most likely result in more downtime.Therefore, the answer to which solution should be first is: Both configuration management and ITAM should be rolled out simultaneously.From a tactical angle, implementing both ITAM and configuration management at the same time enables administrators to use the same discovery tools to capture, upload, and link IT assets to CIs. This allows them to populate both the ITAM database and the CMDB with a single import versus two separate imports.Added benefit: If IT administrators have an accurate inventory of their technology and costs while reviewing IT demands and prioritizing projects, they’ll have data to inform technology acquisition decisions.Configuration and change management workflows that use a CMDB can minimize disruption to the production environment. Both ITAM and configuration management are vital to modernization initiatives, and both should be deployed together.Find out how LIKE.TG CMDB integration into ITAM processes can provide a common place to store and manage data associated with IT assets and CIs.
LIKE.TG Strategic Portfolio Management wins Digital Innovation Award
I’m excited to announce that LIKE.TG® Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) is the winner of the Ventana Research 15th Annual Digital Innovation Awards in the category of Digital Business.The award for Digital Business recognizes a trailblazing vendor that delivers innovation in applications and technologies for work management, as well as numerous other business areas. But it goes beyond that.In addition to examining the innovative technology approach, Ventana Research analysts evaluated how that approach applies to people, processes, information, and technology. The best practices it supports, degree of team involvement, and business impact and value it creates were also factors.Aligning strategy with workAt LIKE.TG, we strive to respond to customers’ needs with innovative solutions. Strategic Portfolio Management empowers organizations to drive business outcomes by aligning their strategy with their work. As a result, it enables them to plan, deliver, and track value across different methodologies and structures.Gaining a competitive advantage in today’s market means delivering value faster, even in the face of constant change. Organizations are focused on doing everything they can to ensure their strategic planning is effective. But misalignment between strategy, planning, and delivery can create major hurdles to achieving desired outcomes.The path to organizational agilityWith LIKE.TG SPM, businesses can realize true organizational agility and deliver work across the enterprise that’s aligned with strategic outcomes, despite today’s disruption-prone environment.By providing the tools to break down the barriers between technology and business, SPM can help accelerate and align all elements of strategy, planning, and delivery so organizations can realize more value, fast.The SPM solution is built on the Now Platform®—a single, unifying platform that delivers complete, timely insights into every aspect of the business. In this way, it enables innovation at scale and speed.This award comes on the heels of Strategic Portfolio Management being named a Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools. We believe it further validates our solution strategy.Find out more about Strategic Portfolio Management in our ebook. You can also watch a webinar to learn how you can drive strategic outcomes.
How to choose the right Agile value metrics
Nearly every business leader these days is focused on achieving value—and for good reason. Business leaders are accountable for ensuring all the work they do delivers the most value possible to the business. Some have adopted Agile methodologies to achieve this.For Agile methodologies to be effective, you need to measure the right things. And to measure the right things, you need the right data producing the right information to provide you with the right insights. Agile value metrics can help.Traditional Agile metrics such as customer engagement, burndown charts (which show the amount of work remaining on a project), and velocity (units of work completed in a given time frame) may seem naturally value-oriented for several reasons.Customer engagement can imply that solutions meet customers’ wants and needs. Burndown charts and velocity indicate value is being delivered consistently and at a reasonable pace. However, these factors aren’t enough to indicate true value.Limitations of intuitive value measurementsValue metrics around discretionary investments are changing. Anyone managing Agile projects must adapt as well and use the most relevant Agile value metrics.If an Agile team is delivering a customer-facing product or service, value ultimately comes from sales of that product or service. But that’s not the best measure, as it can take a long time—years, in some cases—to determine that value. Similarly, internal customer satisfaction doesn’t translate directly to dollars and unit sales.For internal customers, value comes from cost reductions, performance increases, reduced failure rates, and so on. However, those take time to identify and quantify. Users simply saying they like a product isn’t enough. Business leaders must use metrics that are accessible and point to value delivery.3 metrics that indicate value deliveryOther Agile value metrics can yield relevant data quickly. They include:
Newness percentage
Prioritization stability
Adoption and usage rates
Newness percentage measures how much of the team’s work is on new features versus changes, updates, fixes, or removal of existing functionality. The greater the focus on newness, the greater the chance value is being delivered.Consider also prioritization stability. If the prioritized backlog of features never changes, it might suggest no one cares about the product and the value is low. On the other hand, if the prioritization changes constantly, it may indicate a lack of understanding of what customers and users value. Either extreme is undesirable.Don’t ignore adoption and usage rates— both Day One rates and the sustainability of those rates. Subjective measures such as surveys can also be important tools.Find out how LIKE.TG Strategic Portfolio Management helps deliver value. Listen to our podcast for more information.
How modern service operations drive fast resolution of IT issues
Managing technology services and operations can be like trying to jockey around road hazards in a vehicle that doesn’t have all the features you need for the drive. Just as your navigation technology helps keep your journey on track, full visibility into IT issues is vital. That’s what automated service operations offers.When different teams use different tools with different views of data, it can be a struggle to see if there’s a problem. Point and legacy products scattered across on-premises locations and the cloud create a patchwork solution that’s difficult to manage.The lack of a single system of record or cohesive IT workflows between services and operations can leave you stuck in the mud of complexity, inefficiency, growing costs, and diminishing quality of service.Heading in the right directionA modern, unified IT solution can help you stay on course. Consolidating multiple tools and databases into a single cloud platform for technology services and operations retains the value of your existing tools across the enterprise.An integrated configuration management database and common service data model can help you establish a single data model across teams. This, in turn, can ensure accurate information — even if it’s discovered by third-party tools.Connecting IT service management to IT operations processes such as discovery, business service definitions, and mapping can streamline operations.
Moving into the fast laneHaving all your workflows managed on the same platform also puts you in the driver’s seat to:
Share consistent data and insights that create cross-team efficiencies
Gain visibility with a service context so that all IT teams can prioritize problems
Reduce administrative overhead while scaling and improving services and operations
Boost employee engagement and satisfaction with user-focused services
Companies in multiple industries are seeing results from platform consolidation. Accenture improved configuration item accuracy by 50%. By mapping 140 services, NBN can “very quickly understand the impact of alarms and incidents on a wider range of service products.”Removing roadblocks to fast IT resolutionA pileup of service event traffic can cause major delays in the resolution of IT issues. Managing IT services and operations on a platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can generate targeted, prioritized alerts for a smooth ride.This can also empower your teams to quickly identify root causes, triage issues, and route tickets to the right IT operator. Most of the time, that means addressing issues before they impact services and employees — or avoiding outages altogether.
Enterprises across the globe have enjoyed big payoffs from AI-powered solutions. Danske Bank, for instance, decreased its median time to restore services by 79%. Deloitte increased its return on investment fivefold through improved IT workflows.Modernizing the management of service operations is the shortest route to resolving IT issues. It can also make getting to your destination of providing stellar services a more pleasant journey.Get handy references about combining IT services and operations and rapidly remediating IT issues in our infographics.
Lightstep Notebooks helps speed troubleshooting for SREs and developers
Digital business is an imperative for 21st-century companies. Increasingly, organizations are directing investments toward technologies that deliver outcomes fast and enable more resilient digital business models.In this landscape, incidents such as software bugs, power outages, or downed networks have major consequences that affect both revenue and customer loyalty. That’s why I’m excited to announce the general availability of Lightstep Notebooks, an added feature in Lightstep Observability. Available today, Lightstep Notebooks allows for faster, more collaborative, and more accurate troubleshooting.Connecting disparate data sourcesNow more than ever, site reliability engineering (SRE) teams are critical to business resilience. According to IDC’s 2022 SRE Survey, more than one-third (36.3%) of SRE organizations cite improved revenues and profits as a key measure of their teams’ success.1 The same percentage of SRE organizations cite improved customer experience as an SRE success metric.Too often, the same SREs and developers are bogged down with troubleshooting production incidents to understand root causes. SREs and developers must work across different tools, data sources, and even time zones, increasing complexity on their path to resolution.By connecting disparate sources of data, Lightstep Notebooks delivers unified, comprehensive analysis across applications and infrastructure. It allows developers to analyze data through powerful visualizations while creating a structured view of the investigation steps and path to resolution. Additionally, Lightstep Notebooks enables SREs and developers to mitigate incidents quickly and prevent recurrence proactively, maintaining a reliable experience for end users.Presenting a unified viewLeveraging Change Intelligence (Lightstep’s analysis engine), Lightstep Notebooks allows any developer, operator, or SRE to instantly understand changes in their service’s health and underlying infrastructure. This is critical when investigating an incident, collaborating across teams, or quickly documenting learnings to share across the organization. Key capabilities include:
Data visualizations – Ad hoc charts about systems and their underlying data, including heat maps and time series with trace exemplars, help SREs gain insight into why incidents occurred.
High data retention – 100% of trace data can be retained for up to three days, giving SREs ample time to identify the root cause of an incident without any data loss.
Improved collaboration – SREs can easily share Notebooks analyses with colleagues via a sharable link so they can immediately begin collaborating.
Reduced complexity – An instantly generated investigative path within Lightstep surfaces intelligent correlations to quickly and confidently narrow down where a problem lies.
Easy postmortems – SREs can take the insights generated throughout an investigation into a postmortem so teams can discuss root cause issues and take long-term steps to prevent them from happening again.
“Lightstep Notebooks addresses the needs that arise throughout the course of our team’s troubleshooting journey by providing granular, context-specific data and facilitating the ability to collaborate to resolve issues in real time,” explains Damien Mathieu, a staff developer at Okta and a Lightstep Notebooks user.“Notebooks has enabled our team to reduce our reliance on logs, saving us time and resources, and allowing us to deliver a better customer experience through a single, unified view of telemetry data,” he adds.Converting real-time insights into actionLIKE.TG acquired Lightstep in 2021 to solidify and accelerate our position as the world’s leading enterprise platform for digital businesses. With Lightstep, an emerging pioneer in next-generation application monitoring and observability, LIKE.TG helps developers and SREs build, deploy, run, and monitor state‑of‑the‑art, cloud‑native applications.Together, LIKE.TG and Lightstep will continue to extend the benefits of observability across the enterprise through digital workflows that convert real‑time insights into action for the technologies, people, and processes that enable digital business.Lightstep Notebooks comes on the heels of our recent introduction of Lightstep Incident Response. The combination of Lightstep Notebooks and Lightstep Incident Response provides an end-to-end tool set to enable better, more responsive troubleshooting.By removing costly and confusing context switches, Lightstep’s products decrease mean time to recovery and increase customer satisfaction.Find out more about Lightstep Notebooks and how it helps SREs and developers maintain seamless customer experiences.1 IDC, SRE Adoption Success Factors, Doc # US48859422, February 2022
A Magic Quadrant Leader in ITSM Platforms for ninth year in a row
I’m proud and humbled to announce LIKE.TG is a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for IT Service Management (ITSM) Platforms for the ninth year in a row. We also ranked first in all three use cases evaluated in the 2022 Critical Capabilities for ITSM Platforms: Service Desk (3.76/5), Service Operations (3.73/5), and Business Workflow Automation (3.81/5).We believe these recognitions validate our strategy and direction as we continue to invest in making LIKE.TG an enduring platform for a fast-changing world.A platform approachAs LIKE.TG CEO Bill McDermott says, “It’s not about databases and warehouses anymore. It’s about the platform.” The Now Platform® enables innovation and growth for our customers.Each year we place as a Leader reminds us of our passionate attention to customer success. Keeping customers at the center of everything we do drives us to innovate, continuously improve our core offerings, and strengthen the Now Platform to take customers forward on their digital transformation journey—regardless of their current infrastructure and operations maturity level.Having DevOps governance and insights, service visibility and health, intelligence-driven automation, process optimization, workforce engagement, and more built natively on the Now Platform delivers a compelling solution with seamless experiences for personas throughout an organization.With built-in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), hyperautomation, low-code tools, and analytics, the Now Platform transforms the flow of work for customers. These technologies will continue to drive automation and optimization of all service management processes, allowing team members more time to focus on innovation.
Business workflow automationLIKE.TG® IT Service Management (ITSM) isn’t only for technology lines of business. Enterprises increasingly rely on technology organizations to support broader digital transformation needs across the lines of business.For example, our Universal Request framework empowers customers on their journey to enterprise service management or global business services. The framework allows agents to resolve cases seamlessly across the enterprise to provide a better employee experience.Nine in 10 (92%) enterprise IT decision-makers agree business process automation is vital, according to the State of Process Automation Report 2022. And 88% of them expect it to grow in their organizations in the next two years.The good news is businesses can connect anything with LIKE.TG and automate work. Novant Health, for example, uses the Citrix ITSM Connector to automate desktop session resets within the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service. Resets are now completed in 30 seconds, saving the organization thousands of hours.Service deskService desks, the face of IT, are responsible for delivering great support experiences through multiple engagement channels, including web, mobile, and virtual agent. Our Employee Center portal enables customers to easily scale their service solutions across departments—such as IT, human resources, legal, and procurement—with digital workflows.The Now Mobile app extends this experience to employees on the go. Employees can also engage with our Virtual Agent through web, mobile, Microsoft Teams, and other conversational interfaces so they don’t need to context-shift for help.Service desk staff benefit from intelligent automation in many ways. For example, ML automatically categorizes and routes issues to the correct team and can even route a particular issue directly to a specific support agent with the requisite skills to handle it. ML also recommends content that can help employees and agents resolve issues.Workforce Optimization helps technology teams manage their schedules, job performance, and skills development—all while helping to ensure they have sufficient capacity and the knowledge necessary to meet the ever-changing needs of their employees.Service operationsBusinesses must be agile to remain competitive. Cumbersome processes must not delay progress. We created DevOps Change Velocity and DevOps Config to help developers meet their governance and compliance requirements without the burden of legacy software deployment processes. Customers have reduced change approval times from days or hours to minutes or seconds.Nomura, one of the world’s premier financial institutions, uses LIKE.TG ITSM to automatically create and approve change tickets in less than a minute. Agents benefit from the AI and automation to process work fast and make informed decisions while improving operational resilience.All incidents, problems, and changes are handled in a purpose-built workspace that allows agents and operators to work seamlessly together. That means Nomura’s customers can predict, prevent, and resolve incidents proactively from a single workspace with clear visibility into context and impact—before service interruptions impact users.
The changing workforce and rising volume of incidents generated by people and machines continue to challenge organizations. That volume is only expected to increase as employees become more reliant on technology and self-service while machines continue to ingest more data from monitoring, logging, and performance tools.LIKE.TG minimizes this complexity and reduces noise up to 90% while helping to predict issues before they impact users or the business. Service Operations captures the practical result of technology applied to the delivery and governance of IT services at the speed, scale, and volume of business innovation. It’s AI-assisted automation for collaboration of IT service and IT operations.With LIKE.TG Service Operations Workspace, customers are shifting from creating incidents to addressing actionable alerts. Identifying problems, collaborating, and resolving issues happen faster than ever in the single workspace. The embedded AI capabilities help operations and services teams manage the growing issues together and deliver a technology experience employees and customers appreciate.As customers move from reactive to self-healing IT, they can prevent issues from turning into problems. Self-healing systems have the foresight to help predict where issues might occur.LIKE.TG is harmonizing ITSM with Predictive AIOps, IT monitoring, and observability to automate self-healing, from incident detection to resolution. Danske Bank, for example, used LIKE.TG to automate the detection of service disruptions and reduced its high-priority incidents by 93%.Behind every business outcome is a process that drives experiences. As shown in the examples here, the Now Platform digitizes siloed processes—connecting and automating them so work flows and great experiences result. We will continue to invest in our solutions and platform to automate these processes to help our customers reach their goals.Read the full, complimentary Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM Platforms and the companion Gartner Critical Capabilities document.Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Platforms,” Rich Doheny, Chris Matchett, Siddharth Shetty, Oct. 31, 2022Gartner, Inc., “Critical Capabilities for IT Service Management Platforms,” Rich Doheny, Chris Matchett, Siddharth Shetty, Nov. 1, 2022This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document.Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.GARTNER and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Achieving technology excellence to thrive in the digital era
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 operationsIn 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 operationsMore 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 costsTechnology 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 operationsThe 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.Find out how innovative companies are thriving in this new era of challenges in our Book of Knowledge for Technology Excellence.
How the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) truly supports business
Technology leaders are expected to do a lot. Their business partners talk about evolution, agility, and the ability to change direction overnight in response to new and emerging threats and opportunities — with no loss of productivity.Keeping up with the pace of change while delivering on all the work that maintains the integrity and security of the business can be a daunting challenge. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) delivery model can help IT leaders manage the transition from a stability-focused infrastructure to a continuously evolving infrastructure.Scaling Agile across the enterpriseSAFe has been around for a few years, but it’s been gaining traction recently. Today, it’s being used to scale the principles of project- and product-level Agile methodology across all of IT while helping to support alignment with business priorities.The framework takes the Agile principles IT leaders are familiar with and applies them to more strategic, planning-focused layers of the organization. By better coordinating strategy and delivery, SAFe helps ensure work is being done effectively and efficiently — and that the right work is being done by the right people at the right time.In addition, SAFe helps IT leaders work closer to the strategic business priorities of the organization, benefiting everyone.Aligning IT and businessIT remains accountable for ensuring today’s organization is safe, secure, stable, and operational. IT is also responsible for supporting the evolution of the business in order to continuously optimize performance in an ever-evolving world.Balancing those two priorities requires:
A full and accurate understanding of business needs
The ability to adjust technology services to meet those needs
Consistently prioritizing and delivering on work that optimizes value is critical. SAFe has several tools and techniques to help maintain alignment between the business and technology while improving teamwork, collaboration, efficiency, and effectiveness within the various IT functions.Think of SAFe as technology-relevant, optimized business practices — a way for all IT staff, not just leaders, to achieve the most for their time and effort.Find out how SAFe can help you drive global digital marketing in our webinar. And listen to our podcast for more information about SAFe.
How Agile funding helps fund what works
Have you met anyone in your organization who likes the budgeting process? Probably not. Business areas don’t like to get stuck with allocations granted from guessing the amounts they’ll need long before a solid plan is in place.The finance department gets blamed when the business areas don’t get what they want. Executives dislike the infighting and arguments that result when people seek funding for projects that only somewhat align with the organization’s goals.What is Agile funding?Agile funding is gaining in popularity because it addresses a lot of those challenges and reflects the reality of organizations: Things change. Setting rigid budgets in advance of work being carried out doesn’t make good business sense.As the name suggests, Agile funding is designed to be flexible to allow businesses to respond to changing circumstances and invest where the most value is achieved. It elevates funding, aligning it with high-level strategic investments rather than tactical, project-level work.By facilitating adaptive planning, Agile funding moves budgeting decisions to a just-in-time approach. This minimizes the time between finance approval and work execution.A focus on business valueIn recent years, organizations have recognized the importance of enterprise agility—the ability to adapt and adjust to an evolving operating environment with minimal disruption or delay. Whereas traditional budgeting impedes that, Agile funding embraces it.Funding can be directly aligned with organizational objectives and key results, as well as Agile approaches such as the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Funding also directly supports the creation of customer and business value through value streams.This focus on customer and business value is key. Agile funding isn’t the funding of Agile work delivery. It’s the ability to fund all work, regardless of how it’s delivered, in an Agile way that reflects the reality of modern business.Budgets may need to be adjusted. Investments will inevitably need to shift. New and emerging threats and opportunities will require a different investment focus.Value-based planning and reallocationAgile funding models aren’t new processes. They’re fundamentally different ways of thinking about the budgetary process. Instead of focusing on planned, actual, and forecast expenditures, they shift thinking to the value side of the ledger.This value-focused approach requires consideration of:
How large an investment can be justified to achieve a specific outcome
Whether that outcome is being achieved with the current investment level
Additionally, Agile funding streamlines the ability to reallocate funds, ensuring the maximum amount of funding goes to realizing value rather than processing changes to allocations. Administration costs are directly removed from the funds available to generate a return.Find out more about how Agile funding integrates with a strategic portfolio management approach in our Agile finance: Getting what you pay for ebook. You can also listen to our podcast for more information about Agile funding.
Survey: Innovation is a top management imperative
Forward-thinking organizations prioritize innovation—and for good reason. “It’s never been clearer that those who embrace a culture of innovation and digital transformation are going to have the best chance to thrive,” notes LIKE.TG Chief Strategy Officer Nick Tzitzon, guest editor of the Fall 2022 Workflow Quarterly.Research by LIKE.TG and ThoughtLab confirms this insight. Of 1,000 C-level executives surveyed in five industries across 13 countries, 51% reported increased revenue or sales as a result of innovation. Other benefits include improved customer satisfaction (40%), better products (39%), decreased costs (36%), and new business models (36%).
Define and track business outcomes with a goal framework
Highly successful companies and individuals share one similarity: They have an extremely clear vision of what they want to achieve and why. They know that although all work delivers outcomes, not all outcomes yield the same value. That’s why goals and a goal framework are important.Goal setting has always been essential to business success. Businesses today face different conditions and need systems to support their unique challenges in managing goals.Simply setting goals is not enough—you must work to achieve them, track your progress, and adjust your goals to stay focused on the right outcomes. That’s where a goal framework comes in.What is a goal framework?A goal framework is a structured approach to setting and managing goals in order to increase the likelihood of achieving them. It provides a single source of truth for goals across the organization by connecting strategy to the work being done and measuring it against desired outcomes.An effective goal framework must:
Define what you want to accomplish
Set a plan for how you’ll accomplish your goals
Track or measure the degree to which you accomplish them
A goal framework for Agile teamsMany goal frameworks exist. Objectives and key results (OKRs) is a popular one that benefits Agile development teams in particular, as it involves collaboration, problem-solving, regular check-ins, and feedback. For those embracing business agility, goals aren’t fixed points—they’re updated as conditions change. OKRs drive business outcomes through:
Transparent and distributed decision-making
Clarity of purpose and visibility into value
Ambitious achievements that challenge the status quo
With OKRs, all team members, not just the manager, play a role in goal setting. Everyone is empowered to make decisions that provide value and contribute to the success of the business, rather than just doing tasks that are assigned to them.OKRs encourage organizations to shift from tasks to goal-oriented work. With this approach, achieving 65% to 75% of a targeted result is a win and should be celebrated. This excitement helps foster a culture of accountability, inclusion, and innovation.Why you need a shared goal frameworkThe LIKE.TG Goal Framework supports the OKR methodology, among others, to help organizations set and manage goals in a way that maximizes value delivered.Using a common goal framework across the organization provides visibility at every level and connects work to strategic objectives. The focus for success moves from cost, schedule, and scope to customer and business value.In addition, having a shared goal framework makes everyone a stakeholder in strategy and gives employees visibility into value and autonomy. Empowered employees are engaged employees. According to Gallup, highly engaged teams have 23% greater profitability than teams with low engagement.Find out more about how LIKE.TG supports goal frameworks in our ebook: Goals: How strategy gets delivered. You can also listen to our podcast.
Forrester: LIKE.TG is a Leader in value stream management solutions
As corporate budgets shrink worldwide, product and engineering leaders are making tough prioritization calls to focus on the initiatives that truly deliver business outcomes. They’re also looking at ways to optimize costs, especially those resulting from heavy manual processes.The Forrester Wave™: Value Stream Management Solutions, Q4 2022 could not have come at a more important time. At its core, value stream management (VSM) is all about delivering more business value while reducing bottlenecks to the flow of that value. VSM is more relevant now than ever before. I’m excited to announce LIKE.TG is a Leader in VSM solutions, according to the Forrester report.
Although the rapid adoption of DevOps has helped many organizations improve the software lifecycles within value streams, silos between development and operations persist. Large organizations still see manual governance and risk activities slowing down delivery and frustrating developers and the customers they’re trying to serve.Those same organizations want to apply VSM concepts to many different forms of value streams, not just those founded on software delivery.Some companies have been successful in defining business outcomes for their value streams and populating metrics to track value that connect all the way back to engineering efforts. This is relatively rare, however. Most still operate in silos where the highest-level objectives and key results (OKRs) aren’t always connected to the work that development teams are doing. VSM is changing that mindset.Improving visibility and experiencesWhat we believe sets our VSM offering apart is the breadth of the LIKE.TG VSM story: encompassing the full value stream from customer ideas to planning, building, releasing, operating in production, and bringing customer usage insights back for a tight feedback loop.We use the Now Platform® and its single data model to connect every step along the way. Linking the world of DevOps to the work you already manage in LIKE.TG enables seamless experiences and heightened visibility. But we believe VSM can go beyond visibility to an agenda that focuses on cost and efficiency.Increasing value in regulated organizationsNowhere is that more apparent than in regulated enterprises. “LIKE.TG is a great choice for enterprises in regulated industries that prize speed, compliance, and value delivery at scale,” according to the Forrester report.VSM done well can help organizations focus on funding the right things and making quick adjustments as situations change. When Western Southern Financial Group, for example, wanted to bust silos and create a central location to capture, evaluate, prioritize, and execute IT demand, it selected LIKE.TG to help.By gaining centralized visibility across teams with LIKE.TG® Strategic Portfolio Management, Western Southern is able to capture the business value of each of its investments—and implement effective governance processes to reduce program risks and provide transparency.“By using LIKE.TG, our portfolio governance committee and executives get the information they need to prioritize demands, maximizing the business value that IT delivers,” explains Lisa White, IT project portfolio analyst at Western Southern.“Our investment decisions are transparent,” she adds. “Everyone knows what IT is working on, so when a strategic technology investment decision is made, people understand the business drivers behind the decisions and the potential impacts.”Improving for faster time to value“Top-scoring elements of [LIKE.TG’s] strategy included excellent product support, planned enhancements, and a vast partner ecosystem,” according to the Forrester report.The report stated that our VSM solution “delivers top scores for third-party integration, which allowed reference customers to integrate their more ‘obscure tools.’” To us, this is a testament to our extensive partner ecosystem.We’re not surprised by these results. Recent enhancements to our VSM product have sped up time to value and made it simpler to implement VSM capabilities.Many LIKE.TG customers have begun to automate governance without impacting the day-to-day lives of development teams. They use the Now Platform to keep developers in the tools they want to use while eliminating administrative overhead associated with changes. This accelerates delivery while retaining high quality and low risk.The overall VSM movement is just getting started. At LIKE.TG, we continue to work with customers to meet them where they are to help them achieve the outcomes VSM promises: maximum value and minimal waste. We’re all in!Download the full, complimentary Forrester report.
Rethinking your IT asset management strategy
Many businesses waste time, money, and energy trying to manage their hardware, software, and cloud assets. Without an easy way to track these assets, your organization may be paying for outdated software or unused licenses or cloud subscriptions—or struggling to keep up with each asset through its lifecycle.It’s time to rethink your IT asset management strategy. Consolidating management onto a single platform makes it possible to boost productivity. Complete visibility into your assets, coupled with automation, can help ensure your organization makes the most of its time and resources.