How ITOM Streamlines IT Operations Processes to Enhance Agility

IT is having an existential moment, if you will, where it is no longer enough just to support business enablement. IT must also power next-generation digital business models emerging from the widespread adoption of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud.

This leads to a strategic shift wherein organizations must optimize their business and IT operating models to simultaneously extract synergies and improve performance. Many organizations are struggling, however, with how to empower IT to harness this wave of disruption and build a sustainable next-generation operating model.

The IT Ops Solution - ITOM

This is where IT Operations Management (ITOM) comes in. ITOM is all about creating a framework to monitor and proactively remediate operational problems in order to streamline IT operations processes. Using dashboards and automated processes, ITOM helps your IT department visualize how its services fit within your broader organization, especially at intersections where system events require specific actions.

The proficiency with which IT ops is controlled is a determining factor in whether your IT infrastructure can deliver on larger business objectives. Inefficient IT management will hinder progress on enterprise goals and compromise the security and accessibility of your services for customers.

On the flip side, the combination of ITOM’s dashboard views and automation makes it possible for IT teams to focus on more challenging or strategic problems while the system tracks and programmatically resolves routine errors.

How Can You Implement ITOM

To implement the configuration frameworks within ITOM, teams first need to understand the significance of service automation, which in turn requires an understanding of how first-tier technical support rather than specialists can automatically resolve common IT issues.

For each problem that can be paired with a specific action or series of actions, ITOM enables users to create scripted responses that will always occur as a result of preset triggers. These responses can include manual and automatic actions, some of which require intervention by trained IT staff, and some of which can occur all on their own and at any time. The balance depends on the IT team’s preferences for handling different situations.

To illustrate how each of these concepts come together within the ITOM, picture a scenario where the IT team must respond to a relatively routine, straightforward event – an unresponsive server. One of the support technicians can see a visualization of the following scenarios on the event management dashboard:

  • Server and the supported services

  • If the problem can be bypassed by another element of infrastructure

  • If the problem is severe enough to cause an outage

Usually, the most common solution to this problem is simply restarting the server. The dashboard will inform the technician of other required actions integrated into the support script. After executing all the necessary corrective actions, or observing the result of a fully automated action, the technician can return to the dashboard and evaluate the success of the action. When the problem is resolved, the service is restored successfully.

IT ops efficiencies gained free up resources

Although this example shows how event management solutions enable IT personnel to remain proactive and provide better service to system users, it is essential to remember that the objective of ITOM extends beyond infrastructure visualization and includes the implementation of automated solutions.

Since the recommended solution in the illustration is always to restart the server, that action can be fully automated, removing the need for IT staff to intervene. In situations where manual actions are required, the team can script alerts for specific members, automating task assignments and balancing workloads all at once.

The combination of infrastructure visualization and automation make it possible for IT staff to focus on bigger issues while the ITOM-enabled system resolves routine incidents. And as the team adds services to the event management dashboard, they will get a complete picture of the importance of each service within the scope of overall business operations, and the potential severity of issues that might arise.

Complete automation and automation-assisted manual interventions are possible with numerous other actions beyond this example. With ITOM, companies are tracking all critical business services, real time visualization, validating the impact of all negative IT events and implementing end-to-end automation to gain every possible IT ops efficiency.

Streamline IT ops with Trianz

Trianz is a leading ITOM consulting firm with decades of experience helping clients modernize their IT operations management strategies. We specialize in providing end-to-end automation to help you identify every possible way to gain efficiency.

Our consultants can capture your initial set of business services that need to be managed and then map them using your CMDB and service management’s event dashboard. We can also help you define additional dimensions, such as the cost of downtime, service level agreements, or business criticality.

To get insights from an experienced ITOM specialist, identify operational inefficiencies, and get a clear roadmap for maximizing productivity, please reach out to our IT operations management team.

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