效率工具
LIKE.TG Strategic Portfolio Management wins Digital Innovation Award
I’m excited to announce that LIKE.TG® Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) is the winner of the Ventana Research 15th Annual Digital Innovation Awards in the category of Digital Business.The award for Digital Business recognizes a trailblazing vendor that delivers innovation in applications and technologies for work management, as well as numerous other business areas. But it goes beyond that.In addition to examining the innovative technology approach, Ventana Research analysts evaluated how that approach applies to people, processes, information, and technology. The best practices it supports, degree of team involvement, and business impact and value it creates were also factors.Aligning strategy with workAt LIKE.TG, we strive to respond to customers’ needs with innovative solutions. Strategic Portfolio Management empowers organizations to drive business outcomes by aligning their strategy with their work. As a result, it enables them to plan, deliver, and track value across different methodologies and structures.Gaining a competitive advantage in today’s market means delivering value faster, even in the face of constant change. Organizations are focused on doing everything they can to ensure their strategic planning is effective. But misalignment between strategy, planning, and delivery can create major hurdles to achieving desired outcomes.The path to organizational agilityWith LIKE.TG SPM, businesses can realize true organizational agility and deliver work across the enterprise that’s aligned with strategic outcomes, despite today’s disruption-prone environment.By providing the tools to break down the barriers between technology and business, SPM can help accelerate and align all elements of strategy, planning, and delivery so organizations can realize more value, fast.The SPM solution is built on the Now Platform®—a single, unifying platform that delivers complete, timely insights into every aspect of the business. In this way, it enables innovation at scale and speed.This award comes on the heels of Strategic Portfolio Management being named a Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools. We believe it further validates our solution strategy.Find out more about Strategic Portfolio Management in our ebook. You can also watch a webinar to learn how you can drive strategic outcomes.
How to choose the right Agile value metrics
Nearly every business leader these days is focused on achieving value—and for good reason. Business leaders are accountable for ensuring all the work they do delivers the most value possible to the business. Some have adopted Agile methodologies to achieve this.For Agile methodologies to be effective, you need to measure the right things. And to measure the right things, you need the right data producing the right information to provide you with the right insights. Agile value metrics can help.Traditional Agile metrics such as customer engagement, burndown charts (which show the amount of work remaining on a project), and velocity (units of work completed in a given time frame) may seem naturally value-oriented for several reasons.Customer engagement can imply that solutions meet customers’ wants and needs. Burndown charts and velocity indicate value is being delivered consistently and at a reasonable pace. However, these factors aren’t enough to indicate true value.Limitations of intuitive value measurementsValue metrics around discretionary investments are changing. Anyone managing Agile projects must adapt as well and use the most relevant Agile value metrics.If an Agile team is delivering a customer-facing product or service, value ultimately comes from sales of that product or service. But that’s not the best measure, as it can take a long time—years, in some cases—to determine that value. Similarly, internal customer satisfaction doesn’t translate directly to dollars and unit sales.For internal customers, value comes from cost reductions, performance increases, reduced failure rates, and so on. However, those take time to identify and quantify. Users simply saying they like a product isn’t enough. Business leaders must use metrics that are accessible and point to value delivery.3 metrics that indicate value deliveryOther Agile value metrics can yield relevant data quickly. They include:
Newness percentage
Prioritization stability
Adoption and usage rates
Newness percentage measures how much of the team’s work is on new features versus changes, updates, fixes, or removal of existing functionality. The greater the focus on newness, the greater the chance value is being delivered.Consider also prioritization stability. If the prioritized backlog of features never changes, it might suggest no one cares about the product and the value is low. On the other hand, if the prioritization changes constantly, it may indicate a lack of understanding of what customers and users value. Either extreme is undesirable.Don’t ignore adoption and usage rates— both Day One rates and the sustainability of those rates. Subjective measures such as surveys can also be important tools.Find out how LIKE.TG Strategic Portfolio Management helps deliver value. Listen to our podcast for more information.
How modern service operations drive fast resolution of IT issues
Managing technology services and operations can be like trying to jockey around road hazards in a vehicle that doesn’t have all the features you need for the drive. Just as your navigation technology helps keep your journey on track, full visibility into IT issues is vital. That’s what automated service operations offers.When different teams use different tools with different views of data, it can be a struggle to see if there’s a problem. Point and legacy products scattered across on-premises locations and the cloud create a patchwork solution that’s difficult to manage.The lack of a single system of record or cohesive IT workflows between services and operations can leave you stuck in the mud of complexity, inefficiency, growing costs, and diminishing quality of service.Heading in the right directionA modern, unified IT solution can help you stay on course. Consolidating multiple tools and databases into a single cloud platform for technology services and operations retains the value of your existing tools across the enterprise.An integrated configuration management database and common service data model can help you establish a single data model across teams. This, in turn, can ensure accurate information — even if it’s discovered by third-party tools.Connecting IT service management to IT operations processes such as discovery, business service definitions, and mapping can streamline operations.
Moving into the fast laneHaving all your workflows managed on the same platform also puts you in the driver’s seat to:
Share consistent data and insights that create cross-team efficiencies
Gain visibility with a service context so that all IT teams can prioritize problems
Reduce administrative overhead while scaling and improving services and operations
Boost employee engagement and satisfaction with user-focused services
Companies in multiple industries are seeing results from platform consolidation. Accenture improved configuration item accuracy by 50%. By mapping 140 services, NBN can “very quickly understand the impact of alarms and incidents on a wider range of service products.”Removing roadblocks to fast IT resolutionA pileup of service event traffic can cause major delays in the resolution of IT issues. Managing IT services and operations on a platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can generate targeted, prioritized alerts for a smooth ride.This can also empower your teams to quickly identify root causes, triage issues, and route tickets to the right IT operator. Most of the time, that means addressing issues before they impact services and employees — or avoiding outages altogether.
Enterprises across the globe have enjoyed big payoffs from AI-powered solutions. Danske Bank, for instance, decreased its median time to restore services by 79%. Deloitte increased its return on investment fivefold through improved IT workflows.Modernizing the management of service operations is the shortest route to resolving IT issues. It can also make getting to your destination of providing stellar services a more pleasant journey.Get handy references about combining IT services and operations and rapidly remediating IT issues in our infographics.
Lightstep Notebooks helps speed troubleshooting for SREs and developers
Digital business is an imperative for 21st-century companies. Increasingly, organizations are directing investments toward technologies that deliver outcomes fast and enable more resilient digital business models.In this landscape, incidents such as software bugs, power outages, or downed networks have major consequences that affect both revenue and customer loyalty. That’s why I’m excited to announce the general availability of Lightstep Notebooks, an added feature in Lightstep Observability. Available today, Lightstep Notebooks allows for faster, more collaborative, and more accurate troubleshooting.Connecting disparate data sourcesNow more than ever, site reliability engineering (SRE) teams are critical to business resilience. According to IDC’s 2022 SRE Survey, more than one-third (36.3%) of SRE organizations cite improved revenues and profits as a key measure of their teams’ success.1 The same percentage of SRE organizations cite improved customer experience as an SRE success metric.Too often, the same SREs and developers are bogged down with troubleshooting production incidents to understand root causes. SREs and developers must work across different tools, data sources, and even time zones, increasing complexity on their path to resolution.By connecting disparate sources of data, Lightstep Notebooks delivers unified, comprehensive analysis across applications and infrastructure. It allows developers to analyze data through powerful visualizations while creating a structured view of the investigation steps and path to resolution. Additionally, Lightstep Notebooks enables SREs and developers to mitigate incidents quickly and prevent recurrence proactively, maintaining a reliable experience for end users.Presenting a unified viewLeveraging Change Intelligence (Lightstep’s analysis engine), Lightstep Notebooks allows any developer, operator, or SRE to instantly understand changes in their service’s health and underlying infrastructure. This is critical when investigating an incident, collaborating across teams, or quickly documenting learnings to share across the organization. Key capabilities include:
Data visualizations – Ad hoc charts about systems and their underlying data, including heat maps and time series with trace exemplars, help SREs gain insight into why incidents occurred.
High data retention – 100% of trace data can be retained for up to three days, giving SREs ample time to identify the root cause of an incident without any data loss.
Improved collaboration – SREs can easily share Notebooks analyses with colleagues via a sharable link so they can immediately begin collaborating.
Reduced complexity – An instantly generated investigative path within Lightstep surfaces intelligent correlations to quickly and confidently narrow down where a problem lies.
Easy postmortems – SREs can take the insights generated throughout an investigation into a postmortem so teams can discuss root cause issues and take long-term steps to prevent them from happening again.
“Lightstep Notebooks addresses the needs that arise throughout the course of our team’s troubleshooting journey by providing granular, context-specific data and facilitating the ability to collaborate to resolve issues in real time,” explains Damien Mathieu, a staff developer at Okta and a Lightstep Notebooks user.“Notebooks has enabled our team to reduce our reliance on logs, saving us time and resources, and allowing us to deliver a better customer experience through a single, unified view of telemetry data,” he adds.Converting real-time insights into actionLIKE.TG acquired Lightstep in 2021 to solidify and accelerate our position as the world’s leading enterprise platform for digital businesses. With Lightstep, an emerging pioneer in next-generation application monitoring and observability, LIKE.TG helps developers and SREs build, deploy, run, and monitor state‑of‑the‑art, cloud‑native applications.Together, LIKE.TG and Lightstep will continue to extend the benefits of observability across the enterprise through digital workflows that convert real‑time insights into action for the technologies, people, and processes that enable digital business.Lightstep Notebooks comes on the heels of our recent introduction of Lightstep Incident Response. The combination of Lightstep Notebooks and Lightstep Incident Response provides an end-to-end tool set to enable better, more responsive troubleshooting.By removing costly and confusing context switches, Lightstep’s products decrease mean time to recovery and increase customer satisfaction.Find out more about Lightstep Notebooks and how it helps SREs and developers maintain seamless customer experiences.1 IDC, SRE Adoption Success Factors, Doc # US48859422, February 2022
A Magic Quadrant Leader in ITSM Platforms for ninth year in a row
I’m proud and humbled to announce LIKE.TG is a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for IT Service Management (ITSM) Platforms for the ninth year in a row. We also ranked first in all three use cases evaluated in the 2022 Critical Capabilities for ITSM Platforms: Service Desk (3.76/5), Service Operations (3.73/5), and Business Workflow Automation (3.81/5).We believe these recognitions validate our strategy and direction as we continue to invest in making LIKE.TG an enduring platform for a fast-changing world.A platform approachAs LIKE.TG CEO Bill McDermott says, “It’s not about databases and warehouses anymore. It’s about the platform.” The Now Platform® enables innovation and growth for our customers.Each year we place as a Leader reminds us of our passionate attention to customer success. Keeping customers at the center of everything we do drives us to innovate, continuously improve our core offerings, and strengthen the Now Platform to take customers forward on their digital transformation journey—regardless of their current infrastructure and operations maturity level.Having DevOps governance and insights, service visibility and health, intelligence-driven automation, process optimization, workforce engagement, and more built natively on the Now Platform delivers a compelling solution with seamless experiences for personas throughout an organization.With built-in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), hyperautomation, low-code tools, and analytics, the Now Platform transforms the flow of work for customers. These technologies will continue to drive automation and optimization of all service management processes, allowing team members more time to focus on innovation.
Business workflow automationLIKE.TG® IT Service Management (ITSM) isn’t only for technology lines of business. Enterprises increasingly rely on technology organizations to support broader digital transformation needs across the lines of business.For example, our Universal Request framework empowers customers on their journey to enterprise service management or global business services. The framework allows agents to resolve cases seamlessly across the enterprise to provide a better employee experience.Nine in 10 (92%) enterprise IT decision-makers agree business process automation is vital, according to the State of Process Automation Report 2022. And 88% of them expect it to grow in their organizations in the next two years.The good news is businesses can connect anything with LIKE.TG and automate work. Novant Health, for example, uses the Citrix ITSM Connector to automate desktop session resets within the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service. Resets are now completed in 30 seconds, saving the organization thousands of hours.Service deskService desks, the face of IT, are responsible for delivering great support experiences through multiple engagement channels, including web, mobile, and virtual agent. Our Employee Center portal enables customers to easily scale their service solutions across departments—such as IT, human resources, legal, and procurement—with digital workflows.The Now Mobile app extends this experience to employees on the go. Employees can also engage with our Virtual Agent through web, mobile, Microsoft Teams, and other conversational interfaces so they don’t need to context-shift for help.Service desk staff benefit from intelligent automation in many ways. For example, ML automatically categorizes and routes issues to the correct team and can even route a particular issue directly to a specific support agent with the requisite skills to handle it. ML also recommends content that can help employees and agents resolve issues.Workforce Optimization helps technology teams manage their schedules, job performance, and skills development—all while helping to ensure they have sufficient capacity and the knowledge necessary to meet the ever-changing needs of their employees.Service operationsBusinesses must be agile to remain competitive. Cumbersome processes must not delay progress. We created DevOps Change Velocity and DevOps Config to help developers meet their governance and compliance requirements without the burden of legacy software deployment processes. Customers have reduced change approval times from days or hours to minutes or seconds.Nomura, one of the world’s premier financial institutions, uses LIKE.TG ITSM to automatically create and approve change tickets in less than a minute. Agents benefit from the AI and automation to process work fast and make informed decisions while improving operational resilience.All incidents, problems, and changes are handled in a purpose-built workspace that allows agents and operators to work seamlessly together. That means Nomura’s customers can predict, prevent, and resolve incidents proactively from a single workspace with clear visibility into context and impact—before service interruptions impact users.
The changing workforce and rising volume of incidents generated by people and machines continue to challenge organizations. That volume is only expected to increase as employees become more reliant on technology and self-service while machines continue to ingest more data from monitoring, logging, and performance tools.LIKE.TG minimizes this complexity and reduces noise up to 90% while helping to predict issues before they impact users or the business. Service Operations captures the practical result of technology applied to the delivery and governance of IT services at the speed, scale, and volume of business innovation. It’s AI-assisted automation for collaboration of IT service and IT operations.With LIKE.TG Service Operations Workspace, customers are shifting from creating incidents to addressing actionable alerts. Identifying problems, collaborating, and resolving issues happen faster than ever in the single workspace. The embedded AI capabilities help operations and services teams manage the growing issues together and deliver a technology experience employees and customers appreciate.As customers move from reactive to self-healing IT, they can prevent issues from turning into problems. Self-healing systems have the foresight to help predict where issues might occur.LIKE.TG is harmonizing ITSM with Predictive AIOps, IT monitoring, and observability to automate self-healing, from incident detection to resolution. Danske Bank, for example, used LIKE.TG to automate the detection of service disruptions and reduced its high-priority incidents by 93%.Behind every business outcome is a process that drives experiences. As shown in the examples here, the Now Platform digitizes siloed processes—connecting and automating them so work flows and great experiences result. We will continue to invest in our solutions and platform to automate these processes to help our customers reach their goals.Read the full, complimentary Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM Platforms and the companion Gartner Critical Capabilities document.Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Platforms,” Rich Doheny, Chris Matchett, Siddharth Shetty, Oct. 31, 2022Gartner, Inc., “Critical Capabilities for IT Service Management Platforms,” Rich Doheny, Chris Matchett, Siddharth Shetty, Nov. 1, 2022This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document.Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.GARTNER and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Achieving technology excellence to thrive in the digital era
Technology is the catalyst that propels business innovation. It’s the means of ridding inefficiency, delay, and inconsistency from business processes. Technology is the essential element of success for virtually every business in every industry. That’s why technology excellence ranks at the top of every business leader’s list of priorities.Maintaining the level and quality of technology service you need to be competitive comes with many challenges. Organizations must continually iterate application and product development to find the breakthrough capabilities that can give them an edge. That pressure inevitably leads to a constantly growing volume of change tickets.Many service and operations teams are out of sync. They’re locked in functional and informational silos that inhibit effective collaboration. As a result, the employee experience suffers, risk increases, and organizations lose their ability to compete.3 ways to unite technology service and operationsIn essence, organizations need to unite technology service and operations in a way that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts. For a growing number of businesses, that starts with a single cloud-based platform that streamlines and optimizes processes for incident, problem, and change management.The platform should address IT operations needs in the areas of discovery, business service definitions, visibility, and mapping. At the same time, it should support DevOps teams to increase change throughput while minimizing risk and overhead.
How can companies achieve a level of excellence where technology is an enabler of transformation and not a barrier to innovation? Here are three ways:1. Automate and optimize service operationsMore businesses are waking up to the need for a digital-first strategy. That means tech leaders have to manage the surging demand for technology services. Timeworn best practices aren’t much help in tackling demand spikes.Instead, innovative companies are deploying advanced capabilities in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to manage the growing workload. They’re using technologies such as virtual agents to resolve routine service requests. Capabilities such as automated service mapping help provide a more reliable context for ops deployment and troubleshooting.2. Reduce hardware, software, and cloud costsTechnology may be the springboard for innovation and competitive advantage, but tech leaders don’t have unlimited budgets. They’re under pressure to reduce technology spend. A unified, cloud-based platform can help by providing a single pane of glass that allows IT to view and maintain any IT asset (software, hardware, and cloud-based apps) on premises or in a hybrid cloud.When organizations can manage IT assets from the same place where they plan, operate, service, secure, and retire IT infrastructure, they can maintain the control and discipline that keeps costs in check.3. Transform security operationsThe scope, sophistication, and frequency of cyberthreats keep growing. Manual processes, poor communication, and the inability to share data and coordinate resources and responses dramatically increase the threat of disruption.A single platform that facilitates AI-driven, automated workflows and intra-departmental collaboration can help organizations anticipate, prevent, and respond to threats fast. Combining IT security, risk, asset management, and ITOps on a unified cloud platform provides a single source of truth for end-to-end visibility of threats. It also empowers security operations teams to cover an expanding attack surface and improve resilience.Find out how innovative companies are thriving in this new era of challenges in our Book of Knowledge for Technology Excellence.
How the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) truly supports business
Technology leaders are expected to do a lot. Their business partners talk about evolution, agility, and the ability to change direction overnight in response to new and emerging threats and opportunities — with no loss of productivity.Keeping up with the pace of change while delivering on all the work that maintains the integrity and security of the business can be a daunting challenge. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) delivery model can help IT leaders manage the transition from a stability-focused infrastructure to a continuously evolving infrastructure.Scaling Agile across the enterpriseSAFe has been around for a few years, but it’s been gaining traction recently. Today, it’s being used to scale the principles of project- and product-level Agile methodology across all of IT while helping to support alignment with business priorities.The framework takes the Agile principles IT leaders are familiar with and applies them to more strategic, planning-focused layers of the organization. By better coordinating strategy and delivery, SAFe helps ensure work is being done effectively and efficiently — and that the right work is being done by the right people at the right time.In addition, SAFe helps IT leaders work closer to the strategic business priorities of the organization, benefiting everyone.Aligning IT and businessIT remains accountable for ensuring today’s organization is safe, secure, stable, and operational. IT is also responsible for supporting the evolution of the business in order to continuously optimize performance in an ever-evolving world.Balancing those two priorities requires:
A full and accurate understanding of business needs
The ability to adjust technology services to meet those needs
Consistently prioritizing and delivering on work that optimizes value is critical. SAFe has several tools and techniques to help maintain alignment between the business and technology while improving teamwork, collaboration, efficiency, and effectiveness within the various IT functions.Think of SAFe as technology-relevant, optimized business practices — a way for all IT staff, not just leaders, to achieve the most for their time and effort.Find out how SAFe can help you drive global digital marketing in our webinar. And listen to our podcast for more information about SAFe.
How Agile funding helps fund what works
Have you met anyone in your organization who likes the budgeting process? Probably not. Business areas don’t like to get stuck with allocations granted from guessing the amounts they’ll need long before a solid plan is in place.The finance department gets blamed when the business areas don’t get what they want. Executives dislike the infighting and arguments that result when people seek funding for projects that only somewhat align with the organization’s goals.What is Agile funding?Agile funding is gaining in popularity because it addresses a lot of those challenges and reflects the reality of organizations: Things change. Setting rigid budgets in advance of work being carried out doesn’t make good business sense.As the name suggests, Agile funding is designed to be flexible to allow businesses to respond to changing circumstances and invest where the most value is achieved. It elevates funding, aligning it with high-level strategic investments rather than tactical, project-level work.By facilitating adaptive planning, Agile funding moves budgeting decisions to a just-in-time approach. This minimizes the time between finance approval and work execution.A focus on business valueIn recent years, organizations have recognized the importance of enterprise agility—the ability to adapt and adjust to an evolving operating environment with minimal disruption or delay. Whereas traditional budgeting impedes that, Agile funding embraces it.Funding can be directly aligned with organizational objectives and key results, as well as Agile approaches such as the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Funding also directly supports the creation of customer and business value through value streams.This focus on customer and business value is key. Agile funding isn’t the funding of Agile work delivery. It’s the ability to fund all work, regardless of how it’s delivered, in an Agile way that reflects the reality of modern business.Budgets may need to be adjusted. Investments will inevitably need to shift. New and emerging threats and opportunities will require a different investment focus.Value-based planning and reallocationAgile funding models aren’t new processes. They’re fundamentally different ways of thinking about the budgetary process. Instead of focusing on planned, actual, and forecast expenditures, they shift thinking to the value side of the ledger.This value-focused approach requires consideration of:
How large an investment can be justified to achieve a specific outcome
Whether that outcome is being achieved with the current investment level
Additionally, Agile funding streamlines the ability to reallocate funds, ensuring the maximum amount of funding goes to realizing value rather than processing changes to allocations. Administration costs are directly removed from the funds available to generate a return.Find out more about how Agile funding integrates with a strategic portfolio management approach in our Agile finance: Getting what you pay for ebook. You can also listen to our podcast for more information about Agile funding.
Survey: Innovation is a top management imperative
Forward-thinking organizations prioritize innovation—and for good reason. “It’s never been clearer that those who embrace a culture of innovation and digital transformation are going to have the best chance to thrive,” notes LIKE.TG Chief Strategy Officer Nick Tzitzon, guest editor of the Fall 2022 Workflow Quarterly.Research by LIKE.TG and ThoughtLab confirms this insight. Of 1,000 C-level executives surveyed in five industries across 13 countries, 51% reported increased revenue or sales as a result of innovation. Other benefits include improved customer satisfaction (40%), better products (39%), decreased costs (36%), and new business models (36%).
Define and track business outcomes with a goal framework
Highly successful companies and individuals share one similarity: They have an extremely clear vision of what they want to achieve and why. They know that although all work delivers outcomes, not all outcomes yield the same value. That’s why goals and a goal framework are important.Goal setting has always been essential to business success. Businesses today face different conditions and need systems to support their unique challenges in managing goals.Simply setting goals is not enough—you must work to achieve them, track your progress, and adjust your goals to stay focused on the right outcomes. That’s where a goal framework comes in.What is a goal framework?A goal framework is a structured approach to setting and managing goals in order to increase the likelihood of achieving them. It provides a single source of truth for goals across the organization by connecting strategy to the work being done and measuring it against desired outcomes.An effective goal framework must:
Define what you want to accomplish
Set a plan for how you’ll accomplish your goals
Track or measure the degree to which you accomplish them
A goal framework for Agile teamsMany goal frameworks exist. Objectives and key results (OKRs) is a popular one that benefits Agile development teams in particular, as it involves collaboration, problem-solving, regular check-ins, and feedback. For those embracing business agility, goals aren’t fixed points—they’re updated as conditions change. OKRs drive business outcomes through:
Transparent and distributed decision-making
Clarity of purpose and visibility into value
Ambitious achievements that challenge the status quo
With OKRs, all team members, not just the manager, play a role in goal setting. Everyone is empowered to make decisions that provide value and contribute to the success of the business, rather than just doing tasks that are assigned to them.OKRs encourage organizations to shift from tasks to goal-oriented work. With this approach, achieving 65% to 75% of a targeted result is a win and should be celebrated. This excitement helps foster a culture of accountability, inclusion, and innovation.Why you need a shared goal frameworkThe LIKE.TG Goal Framework supports the OKR methodology, among others, to help organizations set and manage goals in a way that maximizes value delivered.Using a common goal framework across the organization provides visibility at every level and connects work to strategic objectives. The focus for success moves from cost, schedule, and scope to customer and business value.In addition, having a shared goal framework makes everyone a stakeholder in strategy and gives employees visibility into value and autonomy. Empowered employees are engaged employees. According to Gallup, highly engaged teams have 23% greater profitability than teams with low engagement.Find out more about how LIKE.TG supports goal frameworks in our ebook: Goals: How strategy gets delivered. You can also listen to our podcast.
Forrester: LIKE.TG is a Leader in value stream management solutions
As corporate budgets shrink worldwide, product and engineering leaders are making tough prioritization calls to focus on the initiatives that truly deliver business outcomes. They’re also looking at ways to optimize costs, especially those resulting from heavy manual processes.The Forrester Wave™: Value Stream Management Solutions, Q4 2022 could not have come at a more important time. At its core, value stream management (VSM) is all about delivering more business value while reducing bottlenecks to the flow of that value. VSM is more relevant now than ever before. I’m excited to announce LIKE.TG is a Leader in VSM solutions, according to the Forrester report.
Although the rapid adoption of DevOps has helped many organizations improve the software lifecycles within value streams, silos between development and operations persist. Large organizations still see manual governance and risk activities slowing down delivery and frustrating developers and the customers they’re trying to serve.Those same organizations want to apply VSM concepts to many different forms of value streams, not just those founded on software delivery.Some companies have been successful in defining business outcomes for their value streams and populating metrics to track value that connect all the way back to engineering efforts. This is relatively rare, however. Most still operate in silos where the highest-level objectives and key results (OKRs) aren’t always connected to the work that development teams are doing. VSM is changing that mindset.Improving visibility and experiencesWhat we believe sets our VSM offering apart is the breadth of the LIKE.TG VSM story: encompassing the full value stream from customer ideas to planning, building, releasing, operating in production, and bringing customer usage insights back for a tight feedback loop.We use the Now Platform® and its single data model to connect every step along the way. Linking the world of DevOps to the work you already manage in LIKE.TG enables seamless experiences and heightened visibility. But we believe VSM can go beyond visibility to an agenda that focuses on cost and efficiency.Increasing value in regulated organizationsNowhere is that more apparent than in regulated enterprises. “LIKE.TG is a great choice for enterprises in regulated industries that prize speed, compliance, and value delivery at scale,” according to the Forrester report.VSM done well can help organizations focus on funding the right things and making quick adjustments as situations change. When Western Southern Financial Group, for example, wanted to bust silos and create a central location to capture, evaluate, prioritize, and execute IT demand, it selected LIKE.TG to help.By gaining centralized visibility across teams with LIKE.TG® Strategic Portfolio Management, Western Southern is able to capture the business value of each of its investments—and implement effective governance processes to reduce program risks and provide transparency.“By using LIKE.TG, our portfolio governance committee and executives get the information they need to prioritize demands, maximizing the business value that IT delivers,” explains Lisa White, IT project portfolio analyst at Western Southern.“Our investment decisions are transparent,” she adds. “Everyone knows what IT is working on, so when a strategic technology investment decision is made, people understand the business drivers behind the decisions and the potential impacts.”Improving for faster time to value“Top-scoring elements of [LIKE.TG’s] strategy included excellent product support, planned enhancements, and a vast partner ecosystem,” according to the Forrester report.The report stated that our VSM solution “delivers top scores for third-party integration, which allowed reference customers to integrate their more ‘obscure tools.’” To us, this is a testament to our extensive partner ecosystem.We’re not surprised by these results. Recent enhancements to our VSM product have sped up time to value and made it simpler to implement VSM capabilities.Many LIKE.TG customers have begun to automate governance without impacting the day-to-day lives of development teams. They use the Now Platform to keep developers in the tools they want to use while eliminating administrative overhead associated with changes. This accelerates delivery while retaining high quality and low risk.The overall VSM movement is just getting started. At LIKE.TG, we continue to work with customers to meet them where they are to help them achieve the outcomes VSM promises: maximum value and minimal waste. We’re all in!Download the full, complimentary Forrester report.
Rethinking your IT asset management strategy
Many businesses waste time, money, and energy trying to manage their hardware, software, and cloud assets. Without an easy way to track these assets, your organization may be paying for outdated software or unused licenses or cloud subscriptions—or struggling to keep up with each asset through its lifecycle.It’s time to rethink your IT asset management strategy. Consolidating management onto a single platform makes it possible to boost productivity. Complete visibility into your assets, coupled with automation, can help ensure your organization makes the most of its time and resources.
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.