Operational Excellence Redefined by Analytics

3AI September 25, 2020

“Myer, a major Australian retailer lost over $21 Million, when their online shopping website crashed due to server communication breakdown”

“A leading bank’s infrastructure managing the ATM operations went down on a particular Sunday afternoon, when the majority of customers were stranded and were unable to make payments of their purchases”

“Whatsapp experienced a 210 Minute outage immediately a few days after the Facebook acquisition, patrons blogged and tweeted about their dis-satisfaction with this kind of an outage”

“A server crash spurs a 3 Hour NASDAQ data blackout, the U.S. stock market, which has a value of almost $20 Trillion was threatened for over 50 such exchanges and alternative electronic venues”

In today’s ever-changing marketplace, infrastructure failure and service downtime is banal, and having visibility into operations is absolutely critical for boosting service levels and efficiency. The vast proliferation of devices and growth of raw machine data, which includes sensors, GPS devices, smart meters etc. has forced businesses across the globe to act upon it sooner than later. Most organizations today aren’t able to leverage this data to the fullest, and a huge goldmine of insights still remains untapped. Making meaning of this device data means enabling a radical paradigm shift in terms of applications/products/services being taken to market, concepts driven from insights drawn out of these large volumes of multi-structures machine data for improved business results.

As per Industry analyst firm, Ovum, “gaining actionable information from the wealth of data generated through change and configuration management activities can help IT work proactively, reduce disruptions to normal service, and help more effectively manage change”

With the advent of IT Operations Analytics solutions, we see a radical shift in the traditional elements of IT. It’s helping business to decipher the root causes of system performance issues, assign probabilities and the relative impact when there are multitude of factors coming into play, analyze service cost and also anticipate events of high importance before they occur among various others.

Leveraging operations analytics can help in:

• Getting a truly holistic perspective, access huge stacks of unstructured device, operational and transactional data and amalgamate with the organizational data
• Empowering your senior management, with business decision-making based on data instead of gut feel. Till today, a substantial amount of time is disproportionately spent running after root causes for performance issues, primarily because ill-equipped technology obscures clues to actual resolution.
• Increase reliability, perform root cause analysis on data to more easily, identify and preempt system failures, and keeping customers (or even internal stakeholders) delighted with high service levels
• Fasten up your BAU operations, by functions/line managers to proactively minimize the operational bottlenecks and streamline processes. Right tools for effective decision-making can improve the infrastructure and operations team’s ability to appropriately allocate resources to the right kind of activities.
• Real-time monitoring & proactive responses, visualize data in real time to monitor end-to-end business operations and deliver early warning signs

With the digital data deluge out there baffling organizations today, IT Operations Analytics tools/solutions/platforms has suddenly gained a lot of traction and can help sift through stacks of data to find relevant patterns aligned to the business. Unless analytics is not appropriately deployed, IT management will continue to struggle, a downward spiral with inability to make fact-based decisions. So it’s time to apply some of the contemporary analytics techniques to the work in IT, and bring the analysis of this digital data detonation inwards for IT Operations.

Incidence Management is a critical piece to IT Operations Analytics today and has been helping businesses across the globe reduce incidence of tickets by proactively solving problems, especially L1/L2 support transformation. It can aid in performing advanced Ticket Management Analysis i.e. patterns analysis of incidences and SLA breaches, do optimal case routing for faster resolution and also do skill based resource allocation for incidence management.

Infrastructure and application support is another crucial piece to the puzzle with real-time monitoring and alerts for ‘At Risk’ components in IT ecosystem plus prediction of outages and failures in infrastructure or application processes respectively being an imperative for analytically mature organizations to address. To allay these concerns and support the IT team, we have Application monitoring systems now readily available, pattern recognition and early warning signs are enabling the IT organization to proactively mitigate some of the foreseeable risks. Infrastructure failure or disruption prediction based on probability of failure for each application is very much a reality now.

Operations maturity analytics is one other area gaining importance across industries today, primarily for rationalizing costs through spend optimization, identifying deviations in spend patterns and contract compliance. Umpteen analytics solutions and services are available in the market today: Vendor risk scorecard, tracking vendor preferences and potential frauds, Order/Charge/Payment mismatch analytics, optimization of order quantity et al.

Rounding up the aforementioned pointers, IT operations analytics can truly transform the way a business operates;  a sustainable IT operations ecosystem powered by Analytical insights.

• Harness the true potential of a Data Center with optimized hardware & infrastructure usage
• Bolster IT operations efficiency and rationalize operating costs
• Smart and early alerts with state-of-the-art failure prediction mechanisms
• An intelligent system highly centered around analytics to swiftly route tickets and triggers based on agent skills
• A holistic monitoring system to track API performance, SLA adherence and agent outcome
• Improved visibility into agent performance and team/LOB dynamics