So, it is the season to be jolly, and for those of us on the nice list, we have already sent off our notes to Santa and we wait in quiet expectation of reindeer hooves on the roof. Every season has its hot toy (I am reliably informed it is ‘Fidget Cubes’ this year), but I am guessing not too many people have a brand new service assurance system at the top of their list.
You might want to think again.
‘Tis the Season of Change
Now, more than ever, it is possible to see the digital revolution taking hold. It’s easy to see the growth of ride-sharing to couch-sharing, the way in which social media has replaced socializing, and dating apps have removed the delicate art of “Do you come here often?”.
Maybe not so easy to see, but equally as disruptive, is the realization that business as usual in enterprise ops has a shelf life. An anonymous CIO of a large, super conservative financial institution recently confided in me that he expects to close his last data center in 2022! Along with that, he expects that ITOps will become as much an online service as AWS is today, with the customer finally dictating how their own s**t is managed.
If you want to digitally transform, surely the eyes and ears of your organization should have been designed with cloud in mind!
Now, this CIO had all kinds of good reasons why that would be a good thing, and I have to say that there are some significant challenges to the realization of that goal, but it got me thinking. However, he also told me that Moogsoft had removed one of the biggest impediments to achieving that goal: Before the bank could contemplate such a move, their old HAL-like system just had to go.
Service Assurance Naughty List
So, if I were running enterprise IT, what clues would I look for that the tired, old service management system needed an upgrade?
- You Experience Persistent Service Quality Issues.
Okay, this is the obvious one. If you keep getting the call in the middle of the night, or you have a bridge open most weekends, it’s time to take a look. After all, you pay a lot of money for software to stop this happening…right? - You Still Manually Create Tickets!
Take a walk round the NOC or ask the DevOps team: When things go wrong, how much is automated? Do they create tickets manually, or is the system efficient enough to do so for them? I mean, right-clicking is a way for Ops to earn a living, but do you really want to be paying for that? - Your Developers Think ITIL is a New Terrorist Group.
ITIL evolved over 20 years ago to ensure the imperfect systems of the ‘90s didn’t leave you embarrassed. Given that half of the development resource in the industry are millennials, they probably weren’t around for the fanfare launch of ITIL. Rather than appreciate the sublime beauty of the 10 steps to resolve and process a service-impacting issue, saying “ITIL is in the building” may instead cause panic! - Your Service Assurance Software was Written Before Amazon Went Public.
Seriously, half of the software out there to manage critical infrastructure was created and designed before Jeff Bezos even thought there was more to life than cheap online book buying. In fact, most of it predates the internet, java, smart phones and so on. If you want to digitally transform, surely the eyes and ears of your organization should have been designed with cloud in mind! - You Suspect your Ops Team Will be the Last to Leave the Data Center When you Shut it Down.
You probably have a hit list for which workloads you will move to public or private cloud, and I bet that right at the bottom are the ITOps crew. Surely, they should be able to do their stuff wherever the app runs, and be leading the charge for flexible agile workflow?
So, there it is. I’m sure you’ve all been good, so treat yourself. If you are looking for alignment between your digital goals and your operations stack, perhaps you need Cow hooves on your roof on the 24th, instead of Reindeer ones.
