business
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TALKING
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reach far higher – US$540,000 per hour – at
the top end.
However, businesses face a twofold threat
from IT outages. The longer-term impact
on brand reputation and share price will
accurately display the loss of customer
loyalty and trust as well as a drop in financial
earnings. Outages from the likes of BA
and TSB have demonstrated just this. The
truth is that consumer expectations are so
high today that there’s not much room for
error. Fail to succeed in today’s fast-moving
business environment and competitors will
be circling before long to steal customers
and market share. That makes effective
monitoring vital to spot the early warning
signs of issues, keep systems up and running
and customers happy.
Keeping the lights on is key to
business success
It’s easy for IT leaders to get caught up
in the dizzying hype and ‘promised land’
of AI in helping drive successful Digital
Transformation. The reality is that we are
years away from the day-to-day deployment
of AI within an organisation and companies
need to have a clear vision of what it
means in terms of people, processes and
technology. Rather, investment needs to be
made into the network and infrastructure
to support Digital Transformation and
“
WITHOUT
THESE SOLID
FOUNDATIONS
IN PLACE,
BUSINESSES’
DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION
PROJECTS AND
GROWTH PLANS
ARE DESTINED
TO FAIL.
40
INTELLIGENTCIO
business growth and provide the speed and
performance needed.
Behind every eye-catching Digital
Transformation initiative lies IT Operations:
the servers, networks, storage, clouds and
virtual systems needed to support flashy
customer-facing apps and services. In
this context, it’s difficult to overstate the
importance of effective IT Operations
Management such as IT monitoring.
Although the discipline is often viewed
pejoratively as merely ‘keeping the lights
on’, the truth is that without these solid
foundations in place, businesses’ Digital
Transformation projects and growth plans
are destined to fail.
It is true to say that in many ways, IT
Operations has been left behind by digital
change, as many organisations still view
it as an afterthought: major investments
in new apps and services are not matched
proactively by improvements in performance
monitoring. Part of this is down to
perceptions of IT Operations and monitoring
as a cost centre rather than a value driver,
but this is because in many cases, firms
aren’t monitoring the right things. Simply
focusing on availability rather than business
service performance will not deliver strategic
value and is the role of the CIO to effectively
communicate this.
Siloed IT teams do not make a CIO’s role
any easier. The lack of communications
between departments prevents the insight
needed to demand and utilise a move
to more proactive monitoring practice.
This in turn creates an inherited culture
of disastrous tool sprawl, with each team
purchasing similar tools from different
vendors to suit their needs without
consulting each other first. In this sprawled
environment, it is impossible for IT leaders
to gain clear visibility over the entire
environment, meaning individuals and
teams are doomed to repeat the same
mistakes as their predecessors – continually
firefighting problems and auto-renewing
even under-performing tools. Gartner claims
that by 2020, 80% of IT Operations tools
and processes in IoT projects will be unable
to meet business requirements.
Visibility really is power and IT leaders
need the right processes in place to provide
them with key insights into dynamic
cloud and virtual environments as well
as the traditional static, on-premises
world. Additionally, this insight needs to
be consolidated via a single monitoring
platform so that a single version of the truth
can enable IT leaders to detect bottlenecks,
see how the IT infrastructure reacts to
specific changes and spot the early warning
signs of any problems which could impact
performance. It’s the only way to minimise
disruption, drive value from IT operations,
elevate the role of the CIO and ensure that
a Digital Transformation project positively
impacts businesses. n
www.intelligentcio.com