Optimising ITOps for Great Work Process and Culture: Key Practices to Consider
IT operations in every company is now standing at the crossroad of opportunities and challenges corresponding to the huge influx of digital data. The smartest ITOPs management across major enterprises are no longer just dealing with data storage and processing, but they have already embraced data analytics as a service. With so many changes taking place at the same time, the ITOPs across companies are searching for a new effective model.
The demand for transforming businesses into a data-centric one is an all-time high. In fact, the smart enterprises of today are driven by data analytics and state of the art data solutions. A business without the ability to respond to the emerging challenges is likely to remain insignificant and inconsequential in the competitive landscape. That’s why it is upon the IT operations team to manage all processes and responsibilities in a streamlined and systematic manner to ensure maximum output involving minimum manpower and cost. This transformation of businesses towards more goal-centric and efficient work culture can only be possible by following practices that are already proven to be effective and useful.
The Internal Work Culture Needs Transformation As Well
In this respect, we must remember that the first building block of organizational transformation is the change in internal work culture and environment. Well, work culture and internal environment in IT companies do not just depend upon the management and boosting employee morale. It is also taken care of by a plethora of sophisticated technologies, tools and development approaches. For instance, the DevOps approach boasting of the agile development principles can actually make the process hyper-responsive and smarter in terms of quality output in record time.
The development cycle with the real-time and instant feedback of the operations can actually help to mitigate a plethora of useful metrics and parameters for evaluating end-user experience while improving the product. Thanks to DevOps for business approach, solving the shortcomings of software products with befitting solutions at a faster pace became easier than ever before.
Moreover, DevOps approach by facilitating streamlined and smooth collaboration among the developers, operations team, sales and support, and other mechanisms can actually ensure the more streamlined operation and delivery of the products. This is why, with the presence of the DevOps approach, the so-called perception about the machines and automation taking away human jobs become baseless concerns. The automation, streamlined development and operations are actually all set to create more success stories and corresponding opportunities. By taking care of repetitive tasks, the automation tools can actually make organizations smarter and smarter than ever before.
IT Operations Facing Similar Problems As Other Industries
In most organizations ITOps was generally thought to have a standalone identity from other business departments. It is also true that for years the ITOps didn't have to face the problems that were common with other departments in any organization. This was true more because while other departments used to be less equipped in terms of technology, ITOps has always been technologically advanced compared to other departments.
But as the digitization and forces of automation are increasingly making business departments and other administrative roles technologically more equipped than ever before, the differences are increasingly reducing. These days, ITOps are facing many problems and challenges that are common to other departments. ITOps are now facing similar issues faced by the customer support or sales departments.
Let's have a look at some of these issues.
- Because of the overwhelming volume and variety of apps and databases, an increasing number of ITOps employees have the problem of making the right choice of tools for the specific context and the problem they need to solve.
- For companies still relying too much on the manual labour for ITOps are facing the same issues concerning productivity and human errors.
- Lack of skilled employees is a key problem for ITOps in many enterprises. As technology is advancing faster, meeting the skill gap is increasingly becoming a major challenge.
- Too many apps and a wide variety of solutions along with multiple issues like compatibility, versions, security concerns, and available skill set make the ITOps landscape incredibly complex and this negatively impacts the productivity.
Best Practices for the Enterprise ITOps to Follow
Best practices and effective principles always help different business departments and job roles to deliver optimum output. Many of these best practices actually help to achieve optimum results using automation. Whether the enterprise leaders want to give more priority to the use of automation or collaborative business principles like DevOps approach, the following best practices and guidelines will help the enterprises to fine tune their IT operations and garner maximum output.
- Instead of running from pillar to post for exercising all the means, pick just one or two aspects and give more importance to them. You need to identify the processes that are pulling down the productivity and performance and setting demotivation among employees. First, you need to address these issues and where required do away with a process like this.
- As soon as you have identified the key pain points you need to explain the key values the automation project can offer. You need to make these things explained to the decision-makers of the company. While explaining always insist on going into the details of the benefits and remain fully prepared to deal with the counter-logic and objections of all sorts.
- Now you need to make an exhaustive evaluation of various available automation tools that can help make the right choice of tools for the enterprise needs. One needs to learn exhaustively about the automation products and finally, one should have a clear idea about the benefits for the specific context of use.
- Once you have finalized the right automation tools for your organizational needs, it is time to build the IT automation skills within the team. You also need to take other team members and organization employees to take into confidence about the benefits of these tools and how they can benefit their work process and boost productivity.
- Another important practice is to boost as much communication as possible communication between the IT Operations teams and the people associated with business departments. As the DevOps and automation are complementary and mutually inclusive, you just cannot keep your focus on one aspect and leave the other. This is why, besides fostering automation, developing trustworthy communication among participants is very important.
- Lastly, you need to build specific indicators and measuring parameters for the performance and start evaluating the performance right away. As soon as the automation tools are up and running, it is extremely important to evaluate and measure the operational benefits of the automation tools and practices. The progress caused by the automation and DevOps approach should be continuously measured and evaluated, and accordingly changes should be incorporated.
Conclusion
The above practices and principles remained as the time-honoured ones as they actually benefited countless future-focused organizations to boost reliability and agility. Without practicing knowledge and skills if the ITOps staff about using automation tools, the exercise of optimizing business process will be futile. That’s why, these best practices prove to be so important.
