Industry Thought Leadership

The Journey to Digital Operations Management

January, 2020
Sudesh
VP, Delivery Head – Infrastructure & Cloud Services MEA

Tech Mahindra

In today’s fast paced era, customer expectations change quickly, in turn radically shifting Business and IT Strategies. IT teams today are facing an increasingly complex landscape of technologies, methodologies with both regulatory and compliance pressures to ensure that new processes are standardized and traceable.

It is a well-known fact that we live in a connected, always-on world where seconds matter when it comes to customer delight. It is not always about just the incident management process rather it is important to consider the bigger picture beyond basic alerting and incident response.

Today, everyone is looking at shifting from Traditional Operations to Digital Operations Management. Digital Operations Management brings together machine learning, automation, and DevOps-centric workflows to mobilize teams where it matters the most. When it comes to digital services, the moves are all about disrupting how our business works today and the necessity of putting in place a next-generation operating model that can sustain new levels of speed, agility, efficiency, and precision.

Accepting this new reality means overcoming some challenges. There is a need to have a digital operations management platform that addresses operational pain—but the platform also should set up teams and larger organizations with the ability to proactively take advantage of opportunities to deliver innovation and delight customers as opposed to simply reacting to incidents.

At the end, digital operations means quicker turnaround time with a digital connected workforce having analytics driven insights with various digital platforms for smoother operations and delivery. Having a digital operations center with best in class reporting and dashboard renders a 360-degree view of every measurable facet of the user experience.
Digital Operations Management is a combination of

  1. Analytics: Predictive Analytics and Real time Dashboards help operational team to get online data, which is churned into dashboards and helps the team to look around and see what is coming and respond before the actual issue hits the environment thereby reducing business outages.
  2. DevOps: Modern Businesses are moving at the speed of cloud and DevOps is essential for any business aspiring to be lean, agile, respond rapidly to changing needs. DevOps is a set of practices that combines development and operations to shorten the lifecycle thereby improve collaboration between all stakeholders from planning through delivery
  3. AI Ops: AIOps is the application of artificial intelligence for IT Operations combining algorithmic and human intelligence to provide visibility into performance of IT Systems. A mathematical model processes data from multiple sources, identifies significant events without the requirement of manual intervention, and enables workflows to be triggered for remedial actions.
  4. Digital Operations Centre: Digital Operations Center transforms IT and ops teams from performing a traditional and sequential delivery model for ops into a new age, agility-driven, nonlinear service delivery model. The solution incorporates best practices framework and best of breed technologies that focus on collaboration, rich service experiences, extreme automation, and agility, to enable outcome-driven solutions for our customers. The Digital Operations Center breaks down organizational siloes and offers agile, out-of-the-box, cost-effective, and value-driven solutions that enable our customers. The core benefits which comes from Digital Operations will focus on
    • Speedy creation, launch, and monetization of new services
    • Optimization of tools and assets
    • Automation and Runbook Automation
    • Better resource utilization and work scheduling
    • Faster resolution through ticketless service desk and AI/ML/Bots
  5. Leverage latest tools and technology: We leverage in-house IP/tools/accelerators to implement a service automation platform for productivity improvements. TechM documents a list of all workflows and tasks of various service lines to be automated and uses its service automation platform tools to automate in a phase-wise manner based on the ease of implementation. The list of workflows and tasks are tracked as a CI Key Performance Indicator (KPI) on monthly basis to ensure a high percentage of service support and delivery activities are automated. Examples of workflows and task automation activities in services include the following:
    • System and application shutdown task
    • Patch management workflow and automated procedures to apply patches
    • System installation and image deployment workflow and procedure
    • User management
    • System recovery workflow and procedures
  6. Digitally connected workforce: This means the workforce needs to adapt to change and increase their knowledge from basic technologies to more niche areas and move the mundane repetitive jobs to be done through automation. This in turn will reduce the human errors due to repetitive tasks and increase job satisfaction among the resources by enabling them to make higher-level contributions. The connected workforce is about resources communicating via all kinds of tools. It’s also about enabling remote working and the accessibility of documents, applications and systems. At a more advanced level, however, the connected workforce is about more than just practicalities. The power of the connected workforce lies in its potential to connect various elements of a business ecosystem, including data, computing devices, applications, solutions and stakeholders.

Finally, the aim is to deliver the right model for customers at the first opportunity in order to enhance customer experience and in turn increase profitability. As technologies and customer expectations continue to evolve, it is high time that enterprises look to digital operations as a means to deliver desired value to customers or risk being left behind.