Have you ever been forced to call a contact center to track a parcel you were waiting for, and been annoyed when you needed to provide the same information over and over during the call?
This happened to me recently. I got quite excited to deal with the fancy automatic speech recognition system. It asked me to spell out my tracking number digit by digit, letter by letter, and it was able to catch all of that information despite my irritated mood and curt pronunciation. Good robot! This cheered me right up, and the good mood lasted right up until I got through to the human operator. Guess what was the first thing they asked me? That’s right — my tracking number. Ooops…
What can we learn from this short story? It is all too easy for the right information to exist somewhere, but not be available when and where it is needed, leading to delays and irritated customers.
Digital transformation and AIOps
What does this scenario have to do with AIOps? More than one might think. To cut a long story short, digital transformation is all about improving organizations’ operations to compete effectively on the market. Cloud, software-defined everything, virtual assistants, automation, etc. — they all enable services to be delivered in a more efficient manner. This increased efficiency and agility comes at a cost however, with much more data to process and to use more intelligently. So, all these disruptive innovations bring change at scale, and force focus to different areas than before.
The best strategy in the world will only get you so far as long as it stays on a whiteboard. The good news is that there are amazing tools available with features already built in to enable and support that transformation, starting right now.
AIOps leverages algorithms and machine learning in order to support IT operations, along with growing amounts of data and accelerating customer demands. AIOps is able to cleverly delegate repetitive tasks to machines, significantly reducing the number of incidents and time spent on their detection, diagnosis, and resolution.
However, achieving all of these goals takes time and effort, as well as knowledge. Not every organization is ready or able to bootstrap itself into this bright future on its own.
Fully Digital, Fully Operational
Let’s take a step back. What is the transformation that we are talking about?
All too often, support issues take a long time to resolve because the ticket gets passed around between several different teams within support, wasting time for both customer and organization. The best technology in the world does not help if it is deployed in an isolated fashion, unconnected to developments in other areas.
Many organizations were not born as digital companies, and therefore they may struggle to move to a fully digital mode of operations. The advantages of emerging digital technologies and new opportunities are obvious, but IT organizations are justifiably change-averse.
This is the sort of issue that cannot be solved by one new technology or product, no matter how great. The root cause is the siloed nature of the IT Operations organization itself, which makes for brittle structures and lots of friction in the process. The problem of silos is beginning to be recognized as a top killer of innovation and customer satisfaction, and so they are getting more focus and attention.
“Through 2020, internal silos of customer engagement within an organization will be one of the top three leading causes of customer dissatisfaction for enterprises across all industry segments” – Gartner, How Supply Chain Can Drive Customer Experiences, 26 April 2017
Throwing machines and algorithms at this sort of human and organisational problem is definitely not the answer. Some of the early movers in Big Data came to realize this the hard way. So, what to do and how to do it?
Great Knowledge + Great Technology = Success
The issue has to be addressed at the right level, combining knowledge, experience and the support of the right technology. This is where Deloitte comes in. Deloitte can support organisations through this process of digital transformation by combining unique business competencies, market-proven strategies, and, last but not least, state-of-the-art technology.
Helping companies to understand digital trends, to plan a strategy toward agility, innovation, and great customer experience, aligning it with organizational capabilities, structure, culture and fast changing markets, supporting it with guidelines for effective execution — all of this is Deloitte’s bread and butter. The combination of these core competencies addresses what is often the biggest challenge for IT organisations: creating and executing transformation, and performing required changes with minimal risk.
The best strategy in the world will only get you so far as long as it stays on a whiteboard. The good news is that there are amazing tools available with features already built in to enable and support that transformation, starting right now. When it comes to service assurance and IT Operations, Moogsoft AIOps can actually run the whole show. Guided workflows enable instant collaboration, with automation behind the scenes to ensure that the right information is available whenever and wherever it is needed. The result is an enormous acceleration of incident resolution, by breaking down technological and organisational silos.
And how long does it take to get there? The entire IT Operations transformation project when delivered by Deloitte with Moogsoft AIOps can take less time than a legacy system upgrade. The benefits don’t stop there, either. Algorithmic event noise reduction means that it’s no longer necessary to continue spending time and money to cut down and filter out events at the sources. Fixed filters just don’t fit well with the dynamic nature of the digital, software-defined world, where the amount of data and the rate of change are both growing at a pace never reported before. And neither one shows any sign of slowing down.
AIOps solution is the key to enabling IT Operations to keep up with ever-accelerating demands from the business. Deloitte’s advice and help are the keys to getting there fast, without disrupting anything that doesn’t need to be disrupted along the way. Moogsoft AIOps was created to support IT operations teams by delegating to machines the repetitive, mundane, and time-consuming tasks, freeing up people to do what humans are best at: creativity. Where it has been fully implemented, AIOps has delivered dramatic reductions in the number and duration of incidents, accelerated MTTD and MTTR, delivered savings many times greater than its own costs, and enabled entire new lines of business.
