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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.
4 ways technology optimization can elevate service operations
As the dependency on fast, easy-to-use technology continues to grow, it’s crucial for organizations to provide their employees with the best digital experiences possible. Workers are unable to successfully do their jobs if they frequently encounter disruptions and outages.Simply put, your IT infrastructure is critical to effective service operations. Technology optimization can help you make better use of the tools you already have and streamline the way your IT department functions. Here are four ways technology optimization can elevate your service operations:1. Minimize issues and outagesComplex digital services often come with potential issues. The more complex your services are, the more problems you may encounter that require immediate attention. Despite this complexity, there are ways to make service operations more efficient.AI-powered service operations can automatically reduce service disruptions and give employees the support they need to successfully do their jobs. Our Predicting issues, reducing complexity, and empowering self-service webinar details how LIKE.TG AIOps can optimize service capabilities to keep business running smoothly.2. Reduce remediation timeIT issues don’t have to take forever to fix. In addition to decreasing disruptions, AIOps can significantly help reduce case resolution time.LIKE.TG has witnessed this firsthand. We use our own products and solutions internally as customer zero. Using AIOps, we developed a self-healing IT infrastructure that runs 24/7 to resolve issues before they can impact business functions and users. Find out more in How LIKE.TG is transforming its digital services program.3. Remedy common challengesBetween managing costs and scaling challenges, it can be difficult to provide effective service experiences. Combining service and operations management offers a more cohesive approach.Unifying these traditionally separate areas can take some of the costs out of IT management and help you expand the breadth of services. Watch 5 powerful remedies for outstanding IT outcomes to learn strategies to boost cost savings and efficiency.4. Strengthen the employee experienceEmployees rely on technology now more than ever. How can you manage the increasing need for service delivery without overwhelming your systems and employees?The answer is to take advantage of the tools at your disposal: AI, automation, DevOps, and cloud governance. Tapping these can help you provide employees with an optimal service experience. Find out how in Strengthen your digital business with people, process, and tech optimization.
A recipe for better IT services and happier teams
Updated Aug. 1, 2023The traditional wall between IT operations and IT services—along with tedious, antiquated processes for resolving IT issues—is harmful to both a company’s productivity and its ability to innovate. It’s also soul-sucking for team members.These conditions hinder data sharing and collaboration. As a result, teams—including IT service agents, IT operators, and developers—must spend hours on cumbersome tasks rather than focusing on meaningful, strategic, cloud transformation projects that make them look forward to their workdays.Mixing ingredients leads to better resultsWhen IT operations and services are managed in silos, identifying issues and resolving them can take time in multistack, cloud-native, and hybid environments, slowing the speed of business. Nearly everything becomes a fire drill of manual processes, disjointed efforts, team friction, and application downtime for employees and customers.What if there were a way to avoid all that reactive firefighting? What if you could combine IT services and operations on a platform that allows for collaboration to rapidly identify and resolve IT issues and bottlenecks? Your team could focus on business and delivering a competitive edge.LIKE.TG Service Operations Workspace brings together workflows to deliver services with 24/7 availability, reliability, and resilience. It provides all the growth functionality teams need to gain visibility into the services and applications running on a hybrid stack. It also enables both services and operations teams to share data instantly, collaborate, and find the right resolution to a problem.With a unified workspace, teams can visualize service health and relationships based on vast event, metric, log, and trace telemetry. This unique workspace even expedites collaboration by connecting teams to stakeholders and experts who have direct relationships with business services and customer applications.Organizations are accelerating to the cloud to improve product innovation and help scale business. Traditional monitoring tools aren’t equipped to solve the increasing complexity this brings to the technology stack. The Now Platform helps ensure teams can contend with the complexity and data volume while keeping services resilient.
3 benefits of automated issue response
A hodgepodge of point and legacy tools can hamper IT service and operations teams. Disconnected, outdated systems that depend on manual processes cause IT to falter on incident response times—or not even know when issues exist.Relying on a patchwork of antiquated tools and systems is like expecting your services and operations teams to run the daily IT sprint as a three-legged race—tied together by the need to collaborate but lacking the agility to do so successfully. Modernizing management of your service operations with automated issue response can help you deliver the rapid service your users expect.1. Gets to the heart of IT issues fastWith an ongoing talent shortage and an expanding IT estate, keeping ahead of outages is increasingly difficult. Being able to quickly find the root cause of an issue is vital for IT teams to maintain responsive service levels.Running an automated machine learning and AI solution on the same platform as your service operations can help IT get ahead of impending problems in your technology environment—turning messy challenges into something more manageable, with a fast time to resolution.Getting prioritized, AI-insights-driven alerts can help teams:
Connect hardware or application changes and evolving issues
Quickly route tickets to IT agents whose skills best match the issues
Empower agents to triage and solve IT issues from anywhere
2. Prevents downtime with predictive AIOpsRelying on outdated technology can leave teams reacting to issues rather than preventing them. How much time do your employees spend at a standstill due to disruptive downtime?Deploying AIOps can keep incidents from occurring in the first place. Using a modern, automated solution that works with your existing tools can help you anticipate issues, whether alerts are triggered by machines or users.Predictive AIOps helps IT fast-track incident resolutions by recognizing signs of a problem and quickly identifying its source, getting the right data into the hands of the right people, and collecting data from monitoring tools to automate corrective actions.
3. Gives employees 24/7 IT supportIn today’s hybrid work world, an intuitive IT service desk interface isn’t enough to equip employees with the rich support experiences they expect. You need to respond to and resolve their requests instantly, provide a catalog of self-service options, and offer 24/7 technology service on any device.AI-powered automation interlaced with your existing tools on a single cloud platform can deliver anytime, anywhere assistance for on-the-go employees through:
A portal and mobile app for self-service
Virtual agents for fulfilling simple requests
Routing to live agents for more complicated asks
The daily technology experience doesn’t have to be a scramble. AI-guided automation can provide IT services and operations teams with the proactive capabilities they need to deliver fast response times.Find out more about automating IT service operations, preemptively remediating IT issues, and giving employees 24/7 IT support in our infographics.
Developing a culture of observability
In the race to attract and retain customers, businesses must deliver great customer experiences, release reliable products fast, and scrutinize costs to achieve consistent growth.That can either be a well-oiled machine or a tangle of disjointed communications and workflows that frustrate customers, employees, and management alike. By developing a culture of observability, you can have a framework that harmonizes the experience for everyone.An example of observabilityObservability is the ability to quickly and efficiently gain insight into the health of your tech estate by gathering, correlating, and interpreting metrics, distributed traces, and log data. This data is also called telemetry.Let’s look at an example of observability in the world of healthcare. If you’re having a heart attack, first responders quickly gather metrics (blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation) and log the event, including important information such as health history and recent meals.To learn more about your heart’s health, a healthcare practitioner takes a trace of your heart with an electrocardiogram, or ECG. The ECG describes the health, timing, and physical condition of your heart.The shape of the trace corresponds to where it was conducted through the heart and where the problem most likely exists. To a healthcare practitioner, the shape conveys your heart’s health.A blood test can yield additional metrics to confirm a diagnosis and guide the care team. All of these elements are forms of observability.
The same logic applies to computer code and systems. As with life-saving medical treatments, time matters when it comes to the health of your tech estate. By tracing running computer code, we can understand where problems may exist. A deep, real-time inspection of running processes can yield fast resolutions, captured by metrics such as mean time to resolve (MTTR).Ultimately, you want your customers and employees to have a positive, seamless experience. If an issue arises, you want a quick resolution and an easy way to examine the outcome so that everyone benefits.How can you develop a culture of observability?Your observability journey may begin with a few enthusiastic team members evangelizing the practice and enrolling stakeholders to adopt it. This is where proofs of concept, demos, and showcases come in. By helping key technical and organizational leaders understand why strong observability will have a positive impact on the business, you’ll more likely get buy-in and sponsorship.Fostering a culture of observability can begin anywhere. When an executive asks the product or engineering team, “How could we have caught that?” it can trigger an observability exercise to determine the services involved and how to resolve issues.If a customer contacts support with an issue, the product or support team should lead the exercise. Invite people to the conversation and create modes of accountability through health targets such as service-level objectives. Reducing incidents and improving quality should be consistently encouraged and incentivized.Why should you develop a culture of observability?It’s important to ask, “Why would we do this?” Create a list of possible reasons, addressing three key areas: customer success outcomes, forces that can lead to burnout, and anticipated high-level business outcomes. Here are some answers to consider:
Improved MTTR
Increased operational efficiency
Proactive issue detection
Improved customer experience
Ability to redirect resources to innovation
Business and/or revenue growth
Reduced employee burnout/ turnover
Increased speed to market
Predictable OpEx
Observability culture is a journeyObservability is a journey of continuous improvement. It starts by identifying and implementing critical workflows or services, followed by observing them over a specified time period to determine health targets (such as service-level objectives). Then, alert thresholds can be set.Your goal is not to overwhelm product or support teams with “alert noise,” but to achieve a balanced number of accurate alerts with strong health targets. By taking time to observe, you can fine-tune the thresholds.Think back to the heart attack example. Without metrics, logs, or traces, patients would face a higher mortality rate, which could lead to negative outcomes for providers. Institutional funding could be jeopardized by negative key performance indicators.If this is happening in your organization, it’s time to evolve to be able to see the overall health of your organization improve. Observability should be seen as an opportunity cost, not a sunk cost. Adopting open-standard technologies and refining your observability strategy can help your organization grow.Schedule a demo to see how you can increase operational efficiency and make your tech estate and your teams more resilient.
6 steps to better infrastructure visibility
Updated June 16, 2023Picture this: A critical business service is offline. Instead of panicking, you’re calm yet concerned.You retrieve data about the service in question and instantly see exactly which infrastructure components or cloud resources the service depends on, as well as their statuses. You quickly engage IT operators to address the issue and notify the line-of-business lead and development team with an estimated time for its resolution.This scenario doesn’t have to be an impossible dream. Infrastructure visibility is a reality for numerous enterprises around the world, including many LIKE.TG customers. It can be your reality too, without nearly as much time and effort as you might think.Developing an infrastructure visibility strategy that includes automated discovery, service mapping, and observability can give you an up-to-date picture of all your business-critical services and customer-facing applications. When an issue arises, you can quickly drill down to identify the component or code change causing it. Even better, you can anticipate potential disruptions and take action to prevent downtime.Let’s explore six steps to help you increase service visibility.1. Consolidate your CMDBFor maximum visibility, we recommend designing a consolidated, service-aware configuration management database (CMDB) to capture all critical infrastructure, business services, and cloud resources across your organization. “Service-aware” refers to a single system of record for the infrastructure estate and service management data.To build your data model, you’ll need a configuration management leadership team of key stakeholders, including IT asset managers, application managers, and staff from incident, process, and change management.2. Prioritize business use casesWhen you design your CMDB, the first step should be defining goals based on business use cases rather than populating the database with as many infrastructure components and cloud resources as possible.Instead of trying to do everything at once, define a well-scoped project. For example, you could start with business service impact analysis, asset management, compliance, or configuration management. In our experience, the most efficient approach is to set one or two high-priority goals, execute them, and then expand to new goals.
3. Adopt a phased plan of attackOnce you’ve designed a global CMDB, the next step is to populate it. Because various discovery, observability, and monitoring tools can take time, we suggest you adopt a phased approach and develop a strategy for collecting on-premises, virtual, and/or cloud data.Should you use agentless discovery? Do you need agent-based discovery for your deployments? Are you trying to import data from other tools? How will you ensure consistency and accuracy without redundancy when using multiple approaches?4. Automate infrastructure discoveryInfrastructure discovery is essential to infrastructure and asset management, providing detailed information about components in the IT network and cloud environment. It’s also critical for your CMDB, as it uncovers configuration items (CIs) and their relationships to each other.Tools designed for infrastructure discovery scout individual applications, microservices, web servers, databases, physical hosts, virtual servers, routers, storage, and other components across the IT estate.We recommend automating this process to populate your CMDB. It’s typically much faster than manually gathering data from spreadsheets or running tools one at a time. You can also collect information about cloud components that make up microservices and APIs.5. Automate service mappingInfrastructure discovery tools are not service-aware. Nor do they understand how CIs blend to create a business service. Without a detailed map of each service, it can be difficult to determine the cause of service issues, understand the potential impact of a planned development change, or prioritize issues.Manually mapping a single business service can take weeks. Moreover, manual service mapping doesn’t work in dynamic environments that change by the minute, such as cloud and microservices-based environments. Even with strict change management, manual service maps become less accurate and valuable over time.In contrast, automating the creation and maintenance of service maps using intelligence and machine learning can provide at-a-glance visibility into services and their dependencies and save significant time.6. Keep your CMDB data up to dateIf you choose automated and event-driven infrastructure discovery and service mapping tools, keeping your CMDB data current should be a straightforward and efficient process. Despite that, we recommend assigning a human owner to this process to spot-check updates for accuracy and maintain your automated tools.Gaining infrastructure visibility can help you reduce downtime and build a strong foundation for service-centric operations management. This will set you up for success in the next phase in the journey to successful AI-powered service operations for 24/7 availability.Find out more in our ebook: Make self-healing IT infrastructure a reaity with AI-powered service operations.
Boosting efficiency with global business services
Executives have a difficult task ahead of them: innovating against a backdrop of global uncertainty. To minimize the possibility of disruption, they’re seeking business strategies that enable them to cut costs while pursuing ambitious projects at scale.This might seem like more of a paradox than a balancing act. However, some executives are meeting their goals with global business services (GBS).GBS is a next-generation operational and organizational model that connects end-to-end processes across the enterprise. It enables organizations to balance operational efficiency with employee and customer experiences—in other words, to grow without sacrificing agility or wasting resources.Why global business services?Shared services organizations comprise people, processes, and technology dedicated to a single business function. Each shared services group acts as a consultant for that part of the organization to deliver services at scale.For example, HR shared services streamline, standardize, and deliver processes such as basic inquiry management, payroll, and employment verification at scale.Some enterprises need to share cross-functional data, tools, and decisions more often than others. Those businesses might want to advance their shared services organizations into a GBS model.GBS aligns multiple enterprise service domains, such as IT, human resources, workplace services, legal, and financial operations teams, under a single leader. This promotes end-to-end processes (e.g., employee onboarding), harnesses economies of scale, and delivers advanced capabilities such as enterprise insights, change management, and continuous improvement.Using technology as the “connective tissue” between departments can seamlessly orchestrate work and tasks to help eliminate silos and drive efficiency, improvements, and frictionless experiences for end users. This frees workers to focus on innovation and customer-centric tasks, and it saves time and money. In short, GBS enables organizations to do more with less.Approximately 80% of Fortune 500 companies have adopted a GBS model for their automatable tasks, such as general accounting and learning administration, according to McKinsey research. Organizations use the GBS model primarily to harmonize and optimize service delivery, adds a GBS on Now report.
Connecting the enterpriseGBS and shared services organizations are also leaning into the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning to connect processes and improve workflows.This creates more unified employee service experiences at a time when the employee experience is paramount. Smart tech makes it easy to provide employee-friendly services, such as chatbots for support tickets and centralized portals that serve customized insights based on what employees need.For example, New Zealand-based dairy nutrition company Fonterra used LIKE.TG to create more opportunities for employees to self-serve, freeing 14,000 hours annually. GBS agents at Fonterra can now resolve requests faster and more efficiently, which allows them to focus the bulk of their time and creativity on tough problems.Another benefit of using a unified service delivery platform is better visibility across departments. When teams are able to access data and insights along an entire end-to-end process, it’s easier for them to identify and anticipate roadblocks and bottlenecks.With democratized data accessible to GBS agents and executives alike, everyone can focus on delivering high-quality services and reducing operational costs.How LIKE.TG can helpAt its core, GBS is about driving efficiency and value at scale. With a unified platform that enables organizations to orchestrate processes from start to finish, deliver exceptional service experiences, and unlock data-driven insights, employees and leaders can focus on what matters most: agility and innovation for the enterprise.The Now Platform is perfectly positioned to enable shared services and GBS organizations to drive value. End-to-end automation enables businesses to create powerful cross-departmental workflows. Streamlined operations make it easy for employees to get work done without headaches.Organizations can boost their employee experiences with browsing and search capabilities that unify disparate knowledge bases. Low-code workflow editors put employees in the driver’s seat, allowing them to build processes and experiences that fit their needs. Operational dashboards illuminate bottlenecks to provide suggestions for improvement.Innovation and cost reduction don’t have to be at odds with each other. Optimizing shared services and GBS can help you build a strong digital foundation that sets the stage for the future without sacrificing time and resources in the present.Find out more about the benefits of GBS.
Gain agility through observability
As companies navigate geopolitical challenges, macroeconomic headwinds, and the post-pandemic comedown, business leaders face intense pressure to drive software transformation, reduce costs, and compete faster in the cloud-transition era of “lift and shift.”Amid layoffs and a slowed pace of hiring, the demand for better tools, real-time insights, seamless experiences, and contextual analysis has skyrocketed. With so much uncertainty, organizations can gain agility through observability, which will be critical.The need for visibilityThe pandemic profoundly altered how and where we work. Since then, the proliferation of distributed teams has exposed gaps in legacy systems and a general lack of visibility across the tech estate.Traditional tools and monitoring can’t keep pace with the growing complexity, scale, and volume of data in cloud-native environments. Without end-to-end visibility, silos remain intact, redundancy persists, and resources are wasted as teams try to identify root causes of problems manually.Visibility becomes even more important as organizations invest in building and scaling revenue-generating applications. Understanding the health and performance of the tech estate is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s table stakes.This heightened attention also means DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE), and operations teams are pushed to drive tighter development cycles and innovate faster than the pace the market demands. At the same time, they’re tasked with meeting service-level objectives. That may lead to burnout.According to Forbes, 58% of developers are suffering from burnout. A Haystack study from the UK reports the figure is closer to 80%.
How can organizations reduce friction across IT, maintain compliance, improve agility, and keep teams from burning out?The answer lies in unified observability and the Now Platform. Together, they can help businesses harmonize modern DevOps and SRE practices, increase change throughput while minimizing risk and overhead, and improve productivity—with a seamless, end-to-end view of the entire application lifecycle.Why observability?I can’t overstate how traditional monitoring systems fall short when it comes to visualizing the health and performance of complex, cloud-native solutions. Microservices are fleeting, as multiple instances automatically scale up and down, adjusting processing capacity to workloads.When you consider the frequency of changes made by distributed teams and the disconnect between running services and the processes that created them, this complexity is further amplified. Often, monitoring fails to capture all the events, communication paths, and other information to trace an issue to its origin.Without end-to-end visibility, there’s simply no way to conduct root cause analysis across thousands, if not millions, of processes. Observability, on the other hand, looks at interdependencies and the architecture of the entire estate to answer the question, “What caused this change?”The benefits of observabilityAside from improved alerting, workflows, and response times, observability provides better business outcomes and gains across the enterprise.Increased leadership trustWhen teams release software faster and with greater confidence, they have better insight into how changes could affect the security and performance of the system.This results in improved uptime, which leads to happier employees and customers—and heightened trust from the leadership team. As more brands compete for attention, both employee experience and customer experience become paramount.Improved cross-functional collaborationWith visibility into the entire tech estate, internal dependencies and communication improve. As project managers, business analysts, and subject matter experts gain clarity, they can shift their attention to opportunities for growth and optimization. Likewise, project sponsors can focus on exploring ideas to increase revenue.Enhanced DevOps successBy spending less time figuring out the root cause of problems and fixing bugs, DevOps teams win. This frees them to focus on the higher-value work of delivering exceptional software. That may help address burnout.
Seeing the big pictureGetting the full picture of the entire tech estate requires aggregating, correlating, and prioritizing the data into actionable insights. To accomplish this, your tooling needs to capture three things:
LogsA log is a text record of an incident that occurred at a specific time. It includes a time stamp, a unique ID for the component involved, and a description of the event or error. Logs can be stored as plain text, binary data, or structured files, with the latter being especially useful for observability because they’re easy to query.
Metrics Metrics are structured data that contains numeric values that measure a specific item over time, such as a business key performance indicator or the number of subscribers to a website. Metrics can be used to track the performance of a system or business and identify trends and patterns over time.
TracesTraces are data that flows through a distributed system from start to finish. They're uniquely identified and contain important metadata, such as the microservice or serverless function that processes a request. Traces are useful for understanding the flow of requests through a system and identifying bottlenecks or other issues.
In addition, it’s important to consider:
Does the tool work with your existing platforms, frameworks, and environments? Without integration, your investment won't deliver the business outcomes you want.
Is the data collected in real time? Outdated data is useless for taking appropriate action, so it's important to use modern event-handling techniques and APIs. It's also important to include the proper context for the data you collect so you can better visualize and correlate it.
Do you have access to user-friendly dashboards? If you don't, it will be hard to deliver business value. Since adoption of the tool is crucial, it should be intuitive and easy to integrate into existing processes.
Next stepsAdopting observability in the enterprise can help achieve significant business outcomes, including mitigating developer burnout and increasing operational agility. By collecting, processing, and analyzing logs, metrics, and traces seamlessly within a platform, you can gain a clear understanding of your distributed system.This can help you detect anomalies and make informed decisions about new releases, ensuring stability and quick root cause analysis. As a result, you can increase efficiency and reliability and ultimately drive success.For DevOps and SREs, it’s best to jump in and get hands-on experience testing various frameworks, tools, and other technical resources. You can also explore the OpenTelemetry website, which provides a deep dive into the features of the observability framework for cloud-native software applications.Request a demo to see how observability can help your organization increase agility and operational efficiency.
How a connected ecosystem can drive growth and lower costs
It’s an exciting time to be a service provider. The shift in enterprise digital buying preferences to everything as a service has opened vast opportunities to strengthen customer relationships and create new revenue streams in such things as robotics, autonomous fleets, analytics, drone-based inspection, and remote telemetry.A connected ecosystem can help you seize these opportunities, accelerate innovation, and grow revenue while reducing the cost to serve.Address a range of needsNo service provider can go it alone and achieve the time to market needed to gain a competitive advantage. It’s not enough to offer one or two basic services. Customers are looking to create strategic relationships with service providers that can address a broad range of business needs.For example, let’s assume you’re launching a managed cloud offering. Your differentiation isn’t the compute and storage—it’s the services that are layered on top. Partners fuel this service innovation, speeding time to market and increasing market share.Even with a broad partner ecosystem, the service provider is still the service provider. That’s the value proposition: one place to go, a trusted relationship, and a single point of accountability—a consistent experience that’s responsive and reliable. An end-to-end experience eliminates silos, connecting service providers and partners into a unified whole to serve customers’ needs.Bring together people, systems, and processesTo achieve this, information must flow seamlessly across organizational boundaries. Automated, end-to-end processes can expedite service fulfillment, reduce service delivery costs, and enable responsive customer support.A connected experience allows service providers to scale both vertically and horizontally, delivering high service volumes while expanding their service portfolio. That’s critical for growth—and it’s not just about integrating service provider and partner systems.Customers want easy access to services and are demanding total transparency—whether that’s ordering new services, seeing how their services are performing, or tracking the status of their support requests. That means breaking down information and process barriers with customers as well.Deliver speed and agilityWhen most people talk about integration, they mean APIs. After all, APIs—along with command-line interfaces and scripts—are the way most integrations are done today. That’s a problem.Many integrations take three to six months, consume skilled resources, and cost far too much. Imagine taking six months to onboard a partner or trying to integrate dozens of partners at the same time. You can’t profitably scale your business or accelerate time to market that way.It’s even worse on the customer front—a huge obstacle to customer acquisition and revenue growth, not to mention an enormous pain for clients.Integrate in hours, not monthsThere’s a better way. With LIKE.TG, you can connect your entire LIKE.TG ecosystem—your customers, partners, and internal business and operations functions—allowing information and workflows to flow transparently and securely across organizational boundaries.It’s a cloud-native approach that allows you to connect your LIKE.TG instance to the LIKE.TG instances of your customers and partners, unleashing new levels of customer experience while helping to drive down costs. For instance, you can:
Embed your services into your customers’ LIKE.TG service catalogs, giving them an “easy button” to order your services and increasing adoption.
Let customers access your support services from their own LIKE.TG instance, connecting them to agents who have complete visibility of your infrastructure, operational processes, and partners.
Connect your own operational workflows with your partners’ workflows without custom coding, allowing you to automatically orchestrate end-to-end order fulfillment and other key processes.
Create a marketplace for managed partner services to augment your own service offerings and drive incremental revenues.
These are only examples. The bottom line is a connected ecosystem can accelerate service innovation, lower costs, and deliver better experiences. That translates into sustainable competitive advantage, strong customer relationships, high top-line revenues, and increased bottom-line profitability—turning opportunities into business growth.Find out more in our ebook: Seize new revenue opportunities while lowering costs.
LIKE.TG named a Leader in process-centric AIOps platforms
I’m excited to announce The Forrester Wave™: Process-Centric AI For IT Operations (AIOps), Q2 2023 named LIKE.TG as a Leader among the top vendors in the crowded AIOps market.1Our journey to this position underscores our leadership in predictive AIOps. We’ve continuously harnessed the immense potential of AI to enhance operational efficiencies, drive productivity, and revolutionize user experiences.Powering IT operations managementThe recognition in the Forrester Wave for Process-Centric AIOps comes as no surprise when we consider the wide array of technology operations capabilities LIKE.TG offers and the groundbreaking AI it uses to deliver them. These capabilities provide organizations with the tools they need to improve IT infrastructure visibility and health, on premises or in the cloud, while automating mundane tasks to increase efficiency.We attribute the Forrester AIOps report’s acknowledgment to our ability to address four fundamental technology operations challenges:
Visibility: LIKE.TG provides comprehensive visibility into IT infrastructure—both on premises and in the cloud—by maintaining a real-time, accurate inventory of all IT assets, their dependencies, and their status, as well as reducing event noise by up to 98%.LIKE.TG also harnesses AI to identify critical business services from network traffic and map those services with just a few clicks of the mouse. This centralized view allows organizations to identify issues before they arise and affect users or the business.
Health: Using AIOps, LIKE.TG helps predict issues before they happen, providing valuable insights into the health of an enterprise’s IT operations—on premises and in the cloud—reducing the mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 45% and decreasing high-priority incidents by up to 93%.AIOps aids in proactive problem management by identifying anomalies and predicting future outages, enabling businesses to mitigate risks in advance.
Service operations: Unlike other AIOps providers, LIKE.TG goes beyond problem detection by integrating IT Service Management and IT Operations Management to deliver exceptional employee experiences and keep digital services running around the clock.
Automation: LIKE.TG automates routine tasks, freeing IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives. This automation extends from the discovery of resources to the prediction and identification of the root cause of an issue to incident resolution, driven by intelligent workflows.
Seizing the next wave of AI innovationA leader in predictive AIOps, LIKE.TG continues to drive value via generative AI to decrease mean time to resolution, increase customer satisfaction, and multiply the productivity of service operations teams. With our recent announcement of Now Assist for Virtual Agent, we’ll extend our AI leadership with safe, responsible, and trusted AI for the enterprise.As the AI landscape continues to evolve, the combination of Predictive AIOps and generative AI will drive the next wave of advancements. We’re helping enterprises automate and optimize to take maximum strategic advantage. We can’t wait to see where this journey takes us next.Find out more about LIKE.TG Predictive AIOps.1 Forrester Research, The Forrester Wave™: Process-Centric AI For IT Operations (AIOps), Q2 2023, June 26, 2023
Q&A: The importance of an end-to-end observability platform
Pressure is mounting for organizations to deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences, rapid event resolution, and better business outcomes. Observability will be a key strategy play to achieve end-to-end visibility of complex tech estates, says Pablo Stern, senior vice president of technology workflows at ServiceNow.In an interview at Knowledge 2023, Stern talked about how an observability platform can encompass both DevOps workflows and business processes across the enterprise. We’ve edited his interview for length and clarity.What does the Now Platform do, and what’s the end game?A couple of years ago, we acquired Lightstep, which is now called Cloud Observability. Part of the thinking around Cloud Observability and LIKE.TG was, “How do we bring what we observe to the actions that you want to take as an organization?”If you look at many of the platforms in the market, they have observability, but it ends there. The action path isn't one that's connected. LIKE.TG can bring, from a cloud perspective, observability through the workflow platform to drive outcomes.For example, when a problem occurs on your site, you can quickly get the right site reliability engineering team engaged to diagnose, identify root cause, and workflow a resolution to bring your site back to health quickly.How do I instrument all those workflows?In the cloud world with OpenTelemetry, there’s a true democratization of the sensors into your estate that help you identify issues. With Cloud Observability, we connect directly into that open-source estate to deliver outcomes. It starts with gaining visibility into those large, distributed cloud estates. You need to understand not only what exists, but also what the applications and services you have are tied to.If there's an issue, the first step is to get visibility. The second step is to push for introspection—whether it's at a trace, metrics, or log—and to then understand where the problem is, what the root causes are. Finally, there’s the action to drive remediation. This is the workflow piece, which is the power of what our platform can do. We can connect those workflows with the right person at the right time to expedite remediation.What’s the difference between observability and monitoring?It starts with the foundational convergence of service and operations. You have service management practices, which is where your teams address issues, such as a major incident or incident response. Then, you have your operations of your estate, which could be hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of different applications or services.We combine those two experiences on the Now Platform. By doing that, we connect the people to the machines.If you consider cloud environments, we not only connect the people and the machines, but we can also see what's happening in those highly distributed environments to find the needles in the haystack. To do this successfully, at cloud scale, you have to evolve from collecting raw data (monitoring) to gaining true insights from that data (observability).And then, when you have those insights, not only do you observe, but you can also act.What are the steps to get to observability?Start with the end in mind. What outcomes are you trying to achieve? Is it delivering amazing customer or employee experiences? What are the things you need in order to do that, and how do you connect that outcome to the systems you have? With many customers, we may see a multitude of systems and tools that help them get to some, but not all, of those outcomes.From a LIKE.TG perspective, we've been very focused to bring that all together in a central control tower so that as you're advancing those outcomes, you can get to them faster. You don't have to “swivel-chair” as much as you did in the past.What's your best advice for customers?Focus on the intended outcome that you're delivering. Observability is going to be key, and it's going to be even more critical in massively distributed estates. You can’t rely on three or four people and their knowledge to determine a root cause quickly, because you may have hundreds or thousands of services that are interconnected.You need visibility into those services. You need to understand them and have a way to quickly observe and diagnose what's happening in those environments. It’s critical to make sure you can go from observation to action. You need to get the right teams to drive the resolution as quickly as possible because you need the full closed loop.Find out more about benefits of Cloud Observability.
Lightstep from LIKE.TG deepens commitment to OpenTelemetry project
At Lightstep, we’ve seen many organizations grapple with “cloud-native sticker shock” as they come to understand that these complex systems require sifting through massive amounts of data across architectures and proprietary solutions.In today’s macroeconomic environment, organizations are looking to reduce costs while driving innovation, especially when it comes to cloud-native applications. With these considerations top of mind, Lightstep from LIKE.TG is excited to announce greater ownership of observability pipelines by increasing our involvement in the OpenTelemetry project.Lightstep from LIKE.TG is the first observability company to give customers total telemetry pipeline ownership. We’re enabling customers to run non-vendor-specific components across environments when they adopt native OpenTelemetry tooling for complete telemetry portability.Why telemetry portability?Telemetry portability is a cornerstone of OpenTelemetry. It isn’t just about sending data wherever you want, although that is nice. Telemetry portability enables users to invest in their monitoring infrastructure for the long term and benefit from that iterative development.By eliminating the need to invest in vendor-specific product knowledge, telemetry portability allows teams to become specialists in their data and their organization, as opposed to a vendor’s proprietary software.Telemetry portability also increases customers’ ability to maintain a consistent view of application health and performance, regardless of observability/monitoring back ends. This reduces vendor lock-in, improves mean time to resolve, and increases overall monitoring effectiveness.When an organization relies on a third party to perform proprietary automated data collection and processing, it doesn’t own the data generated. Oftentimes, if an organization wants to send that data to a third party for visualization or analysis alongside other data, it can’t.As organizations move to adopt OpenTelemetry, Lightstep is committing to embrace native OpenTelemetry tooling exclusively for complete telemetry portability. Starting today, Lightstep customers can send data directly from an OpenTelemetry collector or software development kit (SDK) without requiring vendor-specific components in their environment.They can invest in their telemetry pipeline and instrumentation like any other generic business asset and continue to benefit from that investment.
The OpenTelemetry projectThe OpenTelemetry project has come a long way since we co-created it in 2019. The suite of community tooling available today includes powerful language auto-instrumentation capabilities, hundreds of off-the-shelf integrations, and flexible and modular pipeline components, including the SDKs, the collector, and many additional plug-ins, to comprehensively meet enterprise observability needs.OpenTelemetry is great for enterprises that want to maintain vendor neutrality while maximizing coverage for visibility and observability—all with the benefits of a thriving open-source community.To ensure that community continues to thrive, the Lightstep team has committed to open-source and upstream all OpenTelemetry enhancements generated from the Lightstep engineering team—an industry first. This reaffirms our commitment to the OpenTelemetry community and our customers that Lightstep from LIKE.TG will continue to develop products and features that drive cloud-based innovation.By relying on native OpenTelemetry end to end, organizations have more say over their data and what they can do with that data. For example, if an organization is looking to augment its data sent to an observability back end, the extensibility of the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) encourages teams to introduce specific focus areas to their telemetry pipeline.For organizations on the path to adopt OpenTelemetry end to end, this announcement hands control back to the customer. Every industry is facing upstart disruption from cloud-native first movers and adopters. IDC predicts, “By 2027, the number of digital-native businesses on the SP500 will have doubled, leading to a digitally driven economy."1The Now Platform and Lightstep observability deliver a modern suite of solutions to help software engineers and technologists build, deploy, run, and support new applications as the cornerstone of digital business models.If you aren’t a Lightstep user yet, request a demo to take it for a spin.1 IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Small and Medium-Sized Business and Digital-Native Business 2023 Predictions, Oct. 27, 2022, Simone De Bruin, Katie Evans, Jason Blackwell, Supriya Deka, Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, Cynthia Li, Riccardo Barrai, Andrea Siviero
LIKE.TG is the Microsoft Teams Apps & Solutions Partner of the Year
I’m proud to announce that LIKE.TG is the recipient of the 2023 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award for Modern Work - Apps Solutions for Microsoft Teams. We're also the 2023 Microsoft Asia Pacific Region Independent Solutions Vendor Partner of the Year.At LIKE.TG, our customers are at the core of everything we do. We believe these awards validate that we’re helping customers provide better experiences while simultaneously operating more efficiently.The need for better productivityMicrosoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index found workers are spending more time communicating in meetings, chats, and emails in Microsoft 365 than doing work within the productivity apps themselves. This trend worsens when employees need to search for information or navigate to a new application.Employees spend about three hours in an average workday searching for information, according to Coveo research. Harvard Business Review found employees incur a 9% toggling tax every time they navigate to a new application. Work continues to be complex, and the pace of work continues to accelerate.While generative AI promises to automate manual, time-consuming tasks at work, the reality is most organizations are still figuring out how to implement and use this new technology in a secure and ethical manner. Meanwhile, IT organizations and business teams continue to find ways to make the lives of their employees easier.Partnering for better experiencesLIKE.TG and Microsoft have been partnering in this area for the last several years. When the world changed in 2020, LIKE.TG and Microsoft came together to help our joint customers reimagine the future of work. We shifted the focus from improving efficiency within internal teams to enabling customers to redesign their employee and customer experiences.Customers and partners across various industries caught on as companies such as Siemens, Wipro, Levi Strauss, ASML, and NTT DATA used LIKE.TG and Microsoft Teams to advance a new narrative.While we’re humbled by the recognition of this award, we know there’s still plenty of work to do. At Knowledge 2023, we introduced LIKE.TG on Microsoft Azure for U.S. customers. We also announced the LIKE.TG Generative AI Controller, which can connect to Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service.On behalf of the Microsoft alliance team at LIKE.TG, I’d like to thank Microsoft, our partners, our customers, and all the cross-functional teams within LIKE.TG that helped make this happen. We look forward to driving even more success together in the future.Find out more about how LIKE.TG and Microsoft Teams enable a connected enterprise.
New Service Graph Connector brings open-source data to the workspace
Since LIKE.TG launched the Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry in the Innovation Lab in April 2023, we’ve seen customers use it in pre-production environments. Today, I’m excited to announce that the Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry is generally available for production.Service Graph Connectors allow customers to load large volumes of data quickly and easily into their configuration management database (CMDB). They also help reduce the risk associated with third-party data integration, as they’re certified by LIKE.TG and designed, developed, and tested under the Service Graph Connectors Program.What makes this connector different is that, for the first time in LIKE.TG history, open-source data is brought into the CMDB. This connector offers customers the benefits of a thriving open-source community alongside the confidence they have in the Now Platform.Benefits of an open-source connectorOne of the most critical challenges for any IT and DevOps team is understanding what systems interact with each other and how. The Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry gives teams a new method to map their cloud-native environments in the CMDB using their existing investment in OpenTelemetry.
The Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry brings cloud-native data into the workspace that LIKE.TG users are familiar with, allowing them to diagnose and triage without having to switch context. By using actual telemetry data generated by cloud-native applications, we’re creating accurate, automated, and near-real-time service maps.For many organizations, the biggest difference between the Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry and other data sources is the ease of deployment combined with the breadth, depth, and accuracy of cloud-native data imported into the CMDB.An expanding viewService maps can now span cloud and traditional environments via inferred services, aka non-instrumental services, a capability that exists in Cloud Observability. This will provide a more complete view of the end-to-end technical estate that organizations rely on.We’re also excited to introduce additional Kubernetes infrastructure objects that enable a more granular view of an organization’s Kubernetes estate in CMDB, including:
Clusters
Namespaces
Workloads
Nodes
Pods
Containers
Services
It’s time to unify the vast—and fractured—technology estate that many enterprises maintain. You can manage it all through a single environment: the Now Platform.Find out more about how you can shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive optimization of applications.
LIKE.TG is No. 1 for AIOps, IT operations, and IT service management categories by market share
I’m excited to announce that LIKE.TG is ranked No. 1 in the Gartner® Market Share report for AIOps for the second year in a row. We’re also ranked No. 1 by market share in the IT operations and IT service management categories.1 We believe this confirms that LIKE.TG is delivering on its promise to keep digital services running around the clock while providing exceptional customer and employee experiences.LIKE.TG service operations brings together the market-leading IT Service Management and IT Operations Management capabilities on a single cloud platform. Automating and optimizing technology solutions in this way has helped thousands of customers return millions to their bottom line, improve self-service, and increase the amount and speed of innovation. With LIKE.TG service operations capabilities, a common data foundation, and Service Operations Workspace, employees and customers get an exceptional experience on a single platform.A proactive approach to IT operationsToday’s complex IT environments span on-premises data centers, multiple clouds, and containers. Traditional AIOps solutions aren’t much help in alerting IT operations teams about potential issues that could result in slow service or an outage. LIKE.TG® Predictive AIOps changes that.Predictive AIOps doesn’t have to be told in advance about any issues. It doesn’t have to have thresholds set or data scientists establishing patterns to look for. Instead, LIKE.TG Predictive AIOps can identify issues before they affect users or the business.We’ve been creating AI solutions for years and are committed to delivering safe, trusted, and governed generative AI. LIKE.TG IT Service Management Pro delivers an AI-powered self-service experience for employees to easily get help or request the technology services they need. It empowers employees to resolve issues and requests on their own from anywhere, on any device, without opening a ticket or speaking to a live agent.With LIKE.TG IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, and Predictive AIOps, we believe you can future-proof your technology across the enterprise on a single cloud platform.Find out more about how LIKE.TG service operations can help you deliver exceptional experiences and keep digital services running.1 Gartner, IT Operations Management Software, Worldwide, 2022, 16 May 2023GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission, and the objectivity disclaimer given above. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its 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.
4 ways a strategic portfolio management framework can streamline success
In today’s fast-paced business environment, determining how short-term projects fit into long-term organizational goals may seem daunting. A strategic portfolio management framework is critical for companies looking to align their projects, investments, and resources with their overall business strategy.LIKE.TG Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) can help organizations consolidate their most pressing business priorities on a single platform. Let’s explore four ways SPM can help streamline your path to success.1. Execute a hybrid approach from top to bottomFor many organizations, hybrid and agile methods of project delivery are being implemented only at the execution level. Due to rapidly evolving customer needs, a flexible solution that supports multiple work delivery methods is paramount.To see the best outcomes, organizations should approach project delivery with a hybrid methodology throughout, incorporating both Waterfall and Agile. Watch our World of Work webinar to learn why a hybrid approach is key for high-performing organizations.2. Align with business objectivesAligning projects with business objectives can help ensure investments are in line with an organization’s long-term vision and priorities. SPM provides visibility into the relevance of each project, enabling organizations to make informed decisions about which projects to prioritize.A properly aligned organization increases the ability to bring together funds and people so that you can respond quickly and decisively when change is needed. Gain insights from Lloyds Banking Group, Verizon, GlaxoSmithKline, and others about their experiences in Strategic Portfolio Management Summit.3. Accelerate business valueA strategic portfolio management approach is key to managing your organization’s finances and investments. It can help you view spending, compare scenarios, plan your investments, and more. In turn, this can help you increase the amount of work delivered that’s aligned to strategy, improve business agility, drive digital transformation, and more fully engage value stream management.Strategic Portfolio Management—the framework for success explores how SPM can help you see and fund what matters most.4. Empower the workforceAt the forefront of any organization are its employees. To achieve the best business outcomes, all employees must be united and aligned to the same overarching goals.Using SPM in conjunction with Strategic Planning (formerly Alignment Planner Workspace) enables better connections between business priorities and the workforce, increasing the rate of success. Find out how companies are using these tools in our Align strategy to execution and optimize results webinar.
LIKE.TG is a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability
I’m thrilled to announce that LIKE.TG has been recognized as a Visionary in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability.We believe this validates our strong vision and unique ability to help customers bring unified telemetry into their existing LIKE.TG® Event Management and Service Operations solutions, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and accelerate innovation.Bridging legacy systems and modern operationsLIKE.TG Cloud Observability is one of the few end-to-end solution that unifies critical telemetry data in a single platform to improve security, governance, workflows, collaboration, customer experiences, and return on investment. We’ve been steadily revolutionizing how enterprise teams identify and solve issues fast and make their entire stack more reliable and resilient.Some of our recent innovations include:
Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry enables organizations to easily pull large volumes of data from cloud frameworks such as OpenTelemetry and Kubernetes directly into LIKE.TG without additional tooling. It also helps reduce the risk associated with third-party data integration, as it’s certified by LIKE.TG and designed, developed, and tested under the Service Graph Connectors Program.
Cloud-native logging offers a complete view of all digital user interactions and reduces nonessential data, saving time and resources for DevOps teams.
Unified Query Language (UQL) provides one language for teams to use observability-as-code and helps enable deep uniformity and extensibility across the entire observability experience.
Expanding visibility with unified telemetryThe integration of Cloud Observability builds on LIKE.TG IT Service Management and IT Operations Management solutions—the de facto standards in many enterprise organizations—giving customers a vetted and trusted partner to bridge legacy systems with modern operations.Cloud Observability completes the visibility picture across the enterprise by helping organizations easily identify issues, reduce MTTR, and break down silos to protect revenue and boost customer satisfaction.We believe observability should extend beyond DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams to provide greater value, transparency, and certainty to everyone involved in mission-critical, digital business applications. Since the acquisition of both Lightstep and Era Software, which power Cloud Observability, LIKE.TG has realized that end-to-end vision to help drive enterprisewide transformation and outcomes.Accelerating innovationBy democratizing telemetry pipelines and the data generated by applications, we've led the industry to embrace portable, always-on, and always-open observability. This is vital for true end-to-end visibility, time and cost savings, and the freedom to innovate at scale. Through our commitment to and advancements in the OpenTelemetry project, we’ve created a solid foundation for everyone to innovate even faster.To drive digital transformation and meet demand, organizations are shifting from fragmented point solutions to unified, integrated workflows. This is where LIKE.TG shines.By combining cloud observability, AIOps, governance, and security, customers can resolve cloud-native service issues fast, enhance cross-team collaboration, and harmonize SRE, DevOps, and IT ops practices. When harmony exists, teams can focus on what they do best: innovating and delivering exceptional products and experiences at scale.Thank you to our customers, partners, and team, who continuously reduce complexity and make the world work better for everyone.Read the complete Gartner Magic Quadrant for APM and Observability report.Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability, 5 July 2023, Gregg Siegfried, et al.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.
Modernizing ITSM with ITIL 4: CMDB & service configuration management
The shift of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) 4 from process to value helps IT service management (ITSM) service providers demonstrate business value and adapt to change so they can meet business needs and customer expectations and thrive in an ever-changing technology landscape.However, in the face of an increasingly complex digital business environment, managing the diverse components of IT service operations can be challenging. With hardware, software, networks, and personnel evolving regularly, ITSM service providers need reliable infrastructure solutions to keep pace with these changes.To address this complexity, they often turn to a configuration management database (CMDB) as the cornerstone of their service configuration management (CM) strategy.The connection between CMDB and CMOriginally, CM focused on handling IT technology: hardware, software, and networks. Managing these was often a manual and tedious process, making ITSM providers susceptible to data errors and service deployment issues.CM has transformed into service CM, emphasizing precision, efficiency, and automation. This shift has introduced CMDB.A CMDB serves as a data repository containing information about an enterprise's ITSM service components and their relationships. These components—known as configuration items (CIs)—encompass hardware, software, networks, and personnel.When used effectively, a CMDB can become a potent tool for identifying and monitoring how the addition, removal, or modification of a CI can affect service performance across the entire enterprise.
Top 10 benefits of a CMDBA CMDB is more than a CI repository. It has the power to strengthen various aspects of an organization’s service operations. Let's explore 10 of them:
Event and incident impact assessment by identifying affected CIs and services, which is crucial for event and incident management
Availability analysis and planning to help ensure services are available when needed
Change impact analysis to assess the impact of proposed changes before implementing them
Architecture definition by providing insights into the IT infrastructure's design and components
Forecasting future resource requirements
Understanding asset relationships by helping organizations track and manage their assets effectively
Cause-and-effect analysis for root causes, enabling proactive solutions
Risk analysis by identifying potential risks associated with configuration changes
Cost allocation and budgeting
Contract management by providing insights into contractual relationships with vendors
Steps to accuracy and valueA CMDB and service CM can significantly improve service capabilities across an enterprise, but only if the right questions are asked—and answered.When considering the benefits of a CMDB and service CM, it’s important to:
Assess the need. Evaluate whether your organization would gain from accurate CI data and service CM. Identify the business stakeholders who need this data and why. This stakeholder-focused approach can help ensure your CMDB is outcome-driven and delivers business value.
Define the scope. Consider which areas you need to collect data from and how much data is required. Involve asset and service owners in data control, and evaluate the cost benefit of data collection.
Design your CMDB. Incorporate identified business needs and best practices from tool vendors. Ensure the design facilitates automated data capture and data availability for stakeholders.
A dynamic, out-of-the-box solutionUltimately, a CMDB offers visibility into infrastructure and services. However, tracking changes and maintaining accurate visibility can be difficult. Enterprises frequently introduce new CIs to their workflows.Older methods used to gather data may be incompatible with new data sources. Consequently, data originating from multiple sources of truth leads to needless complexity, uncertainty, and misalignment within the enterprise.LIKE.TG Configuration Management Database uses seamless integration and automation to make it a trusted single system of record; it consolidates multiple data sources into one for accurate, real-time visibility into infrastructure, CIs, and services.This enables ITSM service providers to accelerate time to value and make relevant, data-driven decisions that help them keep pace as the enterprise grows. Just ask our friends at Red Hat, who use LIKE.TG CMDB to provide enterprisewide visibility into IT resources.LIKE.TG CMDB is about unlocking business value:
See a comprehensive picture of complex IT infrastructure and service relationships through a unified interface that uses clear graphical visualizations, simple natural language queries, and customizable dashboards to show key CI details and context.
Establish performance consistency with the product’s single data model, which every LIKE.TG application uses, helping to ensure seamless compatibility with all LIKE.TG products.
Pair with LIKE.TG Service Mapping to map digital services to IT infrastructure, diagnosing issues faster and understanding the business impact of changes before they’re made.
Maximize your investmentA CMDB and service CM streamline service operations and deliver value-driven results. Achieving this requires stakeholder alignment, careful setup, and a platform designed to navigate the complexities of digital business.When these elements converge, your investment can yield substantial returns, including greater visibility, quicker decision-making, accurate data, simplified cost management, and first-rate service performance. ITIL 4 offers numerous avenues for ITSM service providers to maximize their return on investment.Find out more about how your organization can elevate service operations and generate business value in our ebook.
3 ways customer centricity can help technology service providers
IT service providers have historically thought in terms of “technology first,” but that’s changing. More and more of the top technology service providers in Asia-Pacific (APAC) are adopting a customer-centric and industry-oriented approach to how they devise, deliver, and diversify their solutions.That shift in thinking might seem unremarkable. After all, isn’t everyone talking about customer centricity these days? But it could radically reshape how technology service providers structure themselves and amplify the value they create.In a recent forum with some of APAC’s most influential technology service providers, I discovered three areas where applying a customer-centric approach can lead to substantial improvements in performance.1. Building for personas, not vendorsTechnology service providers are adopting a persona-based strategy. They’re drilling down on conversations with trusted customers and starting to restructure their solutions according to industries rather than vendors. That’s a significant change from the “build it and they will come” mindset, where providers create products and even entire business practices based on the vendors or technologies they work with.Take self-service as an example. Technology service providers often recommend self-service and automation as a cure-all for any help desk issue. Yet their conversations with customers reveal that substantial groups of users, such as field personnel, have far more urgent and complex needs than standard self-service portals can accommodate.These users inevitably resort to calling a supervisor or support line rather than using even the most sophisticated self-service app. They’re not getting value from the technical solution, and neither is the business.Based on situations like that, some service providers are introducing more proactive resolution capabilities (such as those offered on the LIKE.TG platform) that take the onus off field workers to find their own solutions.Other providers are continually refining how their self-service capabilities align to different personas’ needs. Tech service provider Mphasis, for example, more than halved its ticket volume with persona-based automation using the LIKE.TG platform.The same applies to developing industry-aligned solutions that account for different operating or marketplace conditions, such as more stringent compliance requirements faced by the banking sector. LIKE.TG has adopted this approach by applying vertical-specific overlays to our configuration management databases (CMDBs) that align with the specific industry’s protocols and customer lifecycle, based on constant feedback from industry players themselves.That in turn accelerates the time to value for these customers and saves them from the tech debt they’d otherwise incur building something similar on their own.Ultimately, persona-based (or industry-based) strategies acknowledge that if we better understand what customers need, we can solve for the right things much faster.2. Process mining with purposeThe customer-centric view should also inform how technology service providers refine their internal operations. More and more providers are aiming to do this through process mining: using real-time process data to better understand and improve their current state of operations. The first question they should ask, however, is: What’s the point?Any investment in data collection or analysis should seek to deliver clear value to customers. That can take all sorts of forms: accelerating time to market for new products, resolving service issues more productively, and so on. Only from there can providers identify the data they need to track and the systems required to track it.Providers should factor in how easily they can gather that data from their platforms and solutions. The LIKE.TG platform allows administrators to view any piece of data captured in the CMDB, meaning providers can quickly spot where workflow bottlenecks exist and derive the root causes.The platform’s built-in machine learning and AI can help by suggesting options to remove those bottlenecks and improve flow. But this depends on providers knowing what processes they want to improve and why—which only ongoing feedback from customers can uncover.Otherwise, they risk being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data out there, or spending a huge amount of capital on a big data solution that doesn’t end up solving a specific problem.3. Exercising discernment with AI and beyondCustomer value should act as a lens or filter when considering investments in early-stage technology, such as generative AI. One participant in our forum put it best when they described the ideal position as “midway between realism and blue skies”—encouraging others to identify immediate customer use cases and opportunities to generate value rather than falling into the trap of “technology for technology’s sake.”Technology service providers would do well to gradually expand their adoption of new technologies, such as generative AI, into existing solutions based on ongoing customer feedback.That same approach has led to LIKE.TG’s introduction of generative AI on our platform: building integration with existing best-of-breed solutions and adding capability based firmly on what customers are asking for in the here and now. For technology service providers, that guarantees some return on investment while building capabilities in unpredictable yet significant fields of innovation.For many technology service providers, leading with customer value will require significant shifts in workflows and processes—not to mention the solutions offered to those same customers. Platforms that allow for both agile development and the strict requirements of certain industries will help providers make those shifts.A culture built around solving problems and listening to users will keep solutions relevant no matter how much, or how fast, technologies change.Find out how LIKE.TG helps ensure a customer-centric approach.
4 ways innovative companies can navigate digital transformation
From the tight global labor market to social and political volatility, macroeconomic headwinds continue to hamper business growth. Such a complex environment is anything but smooth. Your organization may be feeling pressure to deliver on initiatives to support talent, products and services, and business operations.Finding success in these areas requires digital transformation. Innovative companies are best positioned to prosper and thrive.Becoming an innovative companyWhat does an innovative company actually do? For one thing, it enables continuous change from anywhere, blurring the line between experimentation and expectation.It's also at the forefront of technological development, paving the way for others in the industry to follow. An innovative company is full of driven, pioneering people who uncover new opportunities behind every app, process, and experience. These leaders see failure as a trade-off for greater success.Even innovative companies are burdened with the realities of tough times: unengaged and unempowered employees, fragmented data, and limited time and resources.The way forward is to make your organization change-capable every day through continuous transformation. That means investing in digital innovations that connect your people, processes, and systems. And that starts with a platform strategy that can help:
Reduce operating costs
Increase productivity
Minimize risk
Deliver full value from previous investments
Here are four technology imperatives for innovative companies:1. Eliminate silosTo keep your enterprise productive and ahead of the competition, you can’t afford inefficiency, reactive fire drills, or high operational costs in delivering technology services.You must eliminate silos between IT service and operations teams so they can quickly address IT issues and prevent outages. To achieve this, you need to modernize, automate, and optimize the workflows between these teams. That means connecting data they can both access on a single platform—so they can get visibility and collaborate to deliver great outcomes every day.A unified technology service operations approach does more than delight employees and enable constant IT service availability. It also frees your teams—and anyone in the organization—to devote more of their time and talents to business-building change. A satisfying work environment that empowers anyone to innovate leads to higher employee engagement and retention.2. Get the greatest value from ITTechnology leaders need to translate strategy into outcomes that drive business value to keep their seats at the table. Strategic portfolio management enables organizations to prioritize and fund what matters most, build a roadmap to strategize past and new investments, communicate plans, and track progress.It also lets teams plan and deliver work using any methodology: traditional (waterfall), Agile, or hybrid. With LIKE.TG Strategic Portfolio Management, enterprises can reduce nonproductive investment spending by more than $10 million and achieve a 365% return on investment over a three-year period.3. Cut costs with connected IT asset managementManaging any IT asset (software, hardware, cloud, apps), whether it’s stored on premises or in a hybrid cloud, requires total visibility. With comprehensive IT asset management, you can plan, operate, service, secure, and retire IT—managing everything from the same place.By connecting multiple departments on a single platform and automating the end-to-end IT asset lifecycle, you can rein in your IT budget and meet compliance obligations.With a modern IT asset management solution, an enterprise can save up to 67% on the cost of software license true-ups and reduce noncompliance incidents by up to 70%.4. Accelerate cloud adoptionIt’s a struggle to scale cloud initiatives with the same security, cost, resilience, and risk management you would use for on-premises infrastructure. Process challenges, business misalignment, limited software planning, lack of IT visibility, and inadequate governance models can impede your journey to a cloud-first operating model and its benefits.With a unified IT platform, you can maximize interoperability, visibility, and agility to speed adoption, modernize architecture, and reduce costs. To get rapid return on investment in your cloud initiatives, you’ll want to:
Prioritize applications based on business impact, cost savings, or technology risk.
Use self-service automation for request, incident, and change management processes.
Operate cloud services resiliently with AIOps, even when the mix of on-premises and cloud is constantly changing.
You can get through the ups and downs with a strong technology partner by your side.At LIKE.TG, we’re curious and hungry to know what's next. That’s why we’re constantly evolving to meet the needs of our customers, with a platform that can adapt quickly as market conditions change. Together, we’ll innovate and adapt—even through uncertain times—to help you achieve digital transformation and be ready for tomorrow.Get more tips in our ebook: 4 ways to get your digital transformation back on track.
Modernizing ITSM with ITIL 4: Service value system
Svetlana Zenkin, senior product marketing manager for IT Service Management at LIKE.TG, contributed to this blog.Demonstrating value is crucial to the success of any business. That's why it’s an important topic for IT service management (ITSM) service providers to consider when evaluating their service operations.How do IT service operations align with business outcomes and customer needs? How do operational metrics correlate to business value that stakeholders want to see?Answering these questions can be difficult. The latest release of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library—ITIL 4—puts ITSM service providers one step closer to answers by introducing the service value system. It can bring game-changing value to their services.A history of processWhen the ITIL was established in the 1980s by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, it introduced a standardized approach to ITSM that emphasized efficient and predictable IT services using a set of best practices.Versions 1 (1989) through 3 (2013) focused on ITSM processes such as incident management, problem management, and change management.Today, technology fuels every function of an enterprise, not just IT services. Digital trends emerge daily, customer and user expectations evolve on a global scale, and agility is paramount.The processes that worked yesterday may not work today, demanding swift and efficient adaptations from enterprises of all sizes.From process-centric to value-drivenThe ITIL’s original framework of process over value left ITSM service providers vulnerable to misalignment with real-world business outcomes and customer experiences. This rigid and siloed structure clashed with today's agile, collaborative, and value-driven business environment.With its ability to adapt to the business world of today, ITIL 4 (2019) emerged as a transformative update to the framework.Designed to address modern challenges, ITIL 4 champions collaboration, flexibility, and integration with contemporary business practices. Most notably, ITIL 4 looks at ITSM services from a business value perspective—encompassing people, processes, partners, and technology.What is the service value system?ITIL 4 includes several changes that empower ITSM service providers to deliver significant business value. Among the most effective is the service value system (SVS). It’s a comprehensive framework for creating, delivering, and continually improving services that yield value for customers and organizations.
The SVS provides a new way for ITSM—and any organization for that matter—to enhance service quality and align with business outcomes. Let’s take a high-level look at the SVS and its seven components:1. Opportunity/demand – This serves as a catalyst for the SVS. Demand stems from customers' specific needs, such as assistance with an issue or information to complete a task. Opportunity is broader, such as an idea for a service improvement or a new product.2. Guiding principles – ITIL 4 has seven guiding principles that help service managers rethink how they provide consistent, effective, and measurable services:a. Focus on valueb. Start where you arec. Progress iteratively with feedbackd. Collaborate and promote visibilitye. Think and work holisticallyf. Keep it simple and practicalg. Optimize and automate3. Governance – Establishing clear policies, roles, and processes and aligning actions with strategy and objectives help ensure oversight and accountability.4. Service value chain – This is a set of actions, or a value stream, for a product or service delivery that converts a customer’s opportunities/demands into value. Stages include plan, improve, engage, design and transition, obtain/build, and deliver and support.5. Practices – Organizational resources and capabilities are used to achieve objectives, categorized into dimensions such as organizations and people, information and technology, partners and suppliers, and value streams and processes.6. Continual improvement – This emphasizes ongoing enhancement of services, processes, and practices, fostering a culture of learning and adaptation to evolving needs.7. Value – This SVS output highlights value-based metrics. It depends on business stakeholders' perceptions of value, whether those are increased profits or decreased risks. Although the SVS doesn’t pinpoint specific metrics, it guides ITSM service providers and stakeholders to co-create value.Activating the service value systemUnderstanding the SVS is only one step in an organization’s pursuit of an idyllic IT service operation. Selecting the right platform is a significant decision, as it needs to enable your team to implement with ITIL 4 SVS and evolve alongside it.Look again at the seven components of the SVS, and you’ll notice words like value, collaboration, and adaptation repeated. We built the LIKE.TG IT Service Management solution with those words in mind—plus a few more.Terms like predictive intelligence and generative AI accelerate the service value chain by equipping teams with AI-supported tools for faster and smarter incident resolution.Digital Portfolio Management consolidates service data from all of an organization’s applications to help reduce costs and boost performance. And Continual Improvement Management breaks down silos by aligning individuals, data, and business objectives across the enterprise, using a well-structured framework that can be scaled to fit any organization's needs.Reinvent your IT service managementAs the digital landscape continues to evolve, ITIL 4 and the SVS emerge as powerful tools to help organizations overcome the challenges of increased service demand, incidents, and system complexity.Whether your ITSM organization is new or established, applying the SVS to your services can give you versatility to navigate these challenges, adapt to demands, and identify what business stakeholders value the most.Reinvention doesn’t stop with the SVS. Find out more about the transformative power of ITIL 4 in our ebook: Creating customer value with ITIL 4.