IT Automation:
Gartner describes an enterprise’s operational maturity as moving along a spectrum with chaos existing at one end, and as you move across the spectrum from left to right, your enterprise moves into a state of reactivity, then onto being more proactive and service-oriented, and finally at the other end of the spectrum, generating business value.
Stratavia has worked with multiple clients that have leveraged this five step process and made measurable progress in increasing the maturity of their IT environment from the chaotic/reactive levels to proactive/service-oriented levels with an ROI in less than six months.
Five Steps Every CIO Needs to Follow to Increase Operational Maturity through IT Automation
Managing IT has never been more challenging. Business growth, fueled by hard-charging industry shifts, cross-continent merger and acquisition activities, rollup strategies and savage competition from newly-emerging forces is causing both internal and external IT service providers to reach a level of criticality. The typical large company IT shop is seeing rapid growth spurts in applications and data volume. The sheer number of servers, applications and databases has reached never before seen levels. Leading analyst firms state that a staggering 80% of the typical IT budget is spent on maintenance and administration, leaving little time for strategic thinking. The rules of the game have changed such that it is no longer about reducing head-count to contain costs, but about trying to keep up, let alone stay ahead. It is no longer about outsourcing to a “preferred partner” and hoping for the best; it is about slicing and dicing IT teams of internal people and best-of-breed vendors to attain maximum value through specialized focus.
And it is certainly not about deploying a monitoring tool and hoping the bulk of the problems will be avoided, but about implementing holistic, IT management frameworks such as ITIL to obtain and leverage metrics.
Many CIO’s are embracing or have already implemented much of these with limited success. What more can be done? The more relevant question is, what else are your competitors doing? Simply stated, there is a lot more that you can be doing to increase efficiencies through enhanced operational maturity. A perfect example lies in your current IT automation strategy and what it encompasses – does it merely comprise “simple repairs” provided by typical monitoring tools? Or does your approach encompass newer but rapidly-emerging areas such as run book and domain knowledge automation? If it does not, it should.
The Stratavia Five Step Process for Operational Maturity can help make this concept a reality in your IT organization.
Step 1: Attaining Operational Visibility
Metrics - If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Regardless of whether you are the IT back office for a Fortune 100 company or an outsourcing vendor managing several other companies’ infrastructure, you need metrics to obtain the visibility to drive your operations.
CIO’s are increasingly mandating IT managers to raise operational maturity in every silo – systems administration, network administration, storage administration, application administration, and database administration. This mandate is easier said than done; reality is that many IT organizations do not have the data required to identify areas for chance. They lack metrics to determine a baseline of their current efficiency. Without this baseline, it is difficult to evaluate which areas need improvement and increasing operational maturity becomes an unrealistic goal.
