1) Business demands on ITOps have grown. Staff and funding have not.
It’s no secret that ITOps is responsible for keeping important business tools up and running. But as companies adopt more technologically advanced tools (like best-of-breed SaaS apps), ITOps have more to manage. Keeping pace with basic service level requirements is already challenging enough. When ITOps must also support for new initiatives—such as IoT or digital customer engagement—it’s no surprise that over 75% of IT professionals say that pressure on their processes is increasing, according to a Freeform Dynamics study.
ITOps spending, however, has slowed year-over-year. In 2016, spending was expected to grow by almost 2.5%, according to Statista. The same study indicated that in 2018, ITOps spending would grow by only 2.37%. By 2020, the study predicts, ITOps spending will grow by only 2.1%.
Not only does IT spending grow at a slower rate than spending for other departments—digital marketing spend, in comparison, enjoys about an 11% compound annual growth rate—but that spending growth is also quickly shrinking. ITOps teams simply do not have the resources they need to meet the growing demands placed on them.
Pablo Stern, general manager and vice president of ITOM for ServiceNow, explains that this lack of spending growth directly impacts how ITOps functions. “The biggest issue is that IT organizations and budgets haven’t grown at the pace of the technology they are servicing,” he says. “The situation with IT isn’t pretty right now—more critical business services, more infrastructure, more silos, and increased complexity with less visibility […] The tools of yesterday require so much handholding and manual effort that IT is stuck being tactical. They want to be a strategic partner but are ill-equipped.”
Because of this lack of resources, it’s imperative for ITOps to solve inefficiencies within its own processes. Automation and integration would seem like the most obvious way to streamline ITOps, but it can take a lot of time and effort to create automations with traditional tools or custom code.
Most ITOps teams simply don’t have the resources to devote team members to building automated workflows with these methods. But another big problem is the lack of automation and integration specialists. There’s a discrete skill set required to be able to build automations through custom code, and the learning curve for traditional integration platforms can be steep. Even if ITOps can afford to automate, they frequently just don’t have the human capital required to do so. They need a better approach.
2) As enterprise technology has grown, IT faces the same problems as other departments.
It’s common to think of ITOps staff and lines-of-business staff as almost two different species. It’s easy to assume that ITOps will be the exception to many trends that affect other departments as they adopt new technology. After all, ITOps staff are more technically skilled than other employees. They should be well-equipped to address the changing ITOps landscape.
But data shows that ITOps do experience many of the same trends as other departments. For example, a Freeform Dynamics study demonstrates that when it comes to increasing productivity, ITOps faces the same barriers as teams like sales or customer support, such as:
- Too many disparate apps and databases. 69% of ITOps staff say they face difficulties using too many different tools.
- Workflows that involve manual or people-based steps.61% cited reliance on manual processes as a barrier to productivity.
- Not enough skilled staff. 60% of ITOps employees say their team faces a skills shortage.
- Landscape complexity. 76% said that the ITOps landscape is so complex, it hampers productivity.
3) Opportunistic automation creates its own inefficiencies.
Because ITOps are overtaxed and under-resourced, most teams approach automation without a comprehensive plan. Instead, they build automations on an ad-hoc basis, whenever they have the time or when a process is deemed high-priority. For many ITOps teams, automation is opportunistic rather than systematic, explains Milind Govekar, research vice president at Gartner. “Most current use of automation in IT involves scripting,” he says, which creates even more inefficiencies because they are difficult to change. “Scripts are more fragile than agile. What you end up with is disconnected islands of automation.” This opportunistic, script-based approach also reinforces an inefficient mindset: hero culture. In hero culture, an individual employee creates custom code to automate away a problem. But if that employee ever switches roles or leaves the organization, the ITOps team has no record of that solution. They cannot improve upon it or adapt it to meet the team’s evolving needs. Instead, they must start over from scratch—almost as though the process was never automated to begin with. That’s wildly inefficient and doesn’t equip ITOps to contend with the increasing demands placed on it. Additionally, opportunistic automation can lead ITOps to use several highly specialized tools, rather than adopting a comprehensive platform that can create a broad spectrum of workflows. The team might use one tool to build point-to-point integrations but another platform for process automations, for example. By 2017, Gartner predicted that 75% of enterprises had more than four diverse automation technologies within their IT management portfolios. Using multiple tools creates more inefficiencies because ITOps must take the time to learn how to use each one, and they can’t maintain their automations from a central location. They also have to identify and select a new tool every time they need to build an automation that their current tools aren’t equipped to handle. And purchasing many tools has a higher total cost of ownership. “The more you standardize the environment before automating it further, the better placed you will be,” comments Govekar.4) The stakes have never been higher.
With the push for digital transformation across entire industries and organizations, the need for automation within ITOps is more crucial than ever. In many ways, ITOps are the linchpin of implementing digital transformation. “Businesses desperately need IT to build new skills, such as data science, analytics, and other areas,” says Govekar. “But IT can’t do it if they’re spending all their time doing tasks that could be automated.” It’s important for ITOps to function as efficiently as possible. Otherwise, they won’t be able to support the organization as it digitally transforms and future-proofs.What does a new approach to automation look like?
These problems should directly shape how ITOps approaches the automation problem. A better approach to automation:-
…supports a two-speed IT architecture
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…is transformative and versatile.
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…offers seamless error handling.
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…incorporates intelligent technologies
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…happens on one platform.
- Process automations
- API management
- Data hubs
- Intelligent robotic process automation (RPA)
- Bot-based workflows
- IoT integrations
