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December 6, 2021 - by Synoptek
IT leaders want their IT operations to be proactive. But how does a struggling and reactive team move away from firefighting challenges such as routing and re-routing requests and hunting down unknown root causes causing outages to identifying challenges before they turn into problems and spending a majority of their time generating revenue, saving costs, and creating value for their business and customers?
Of course, Rome wasn’t built in a day! The journey from being a reactive IT team to one that adds value takes time and concrete planning and execution on the way. Let’s look at the high-level roadmap of how your IT operation can cover this journey.
It’s not the most intriguing part of the journey, but it’s absolutely the most critical! Establish a configuration management database (CMDB) that can be trusted. Your single source of truth for all CIs and assets. While there are tools to automate the population of these items and assets, it’s just as important to establish policies for governance. Define:
Everything that you’ll see and act on in the next steps will inevitably fall back on the accuracy of your CMDB. If you’re pulling data from an untrusted source, there’s simply no point in going any further. Process, policy, and governance need to be laid out at the very beginning. All these components will help capitalize on the impactful stages of the journey ahead.
This step is about laying down the bricks for the foundation. You need to free up your Service Desk and Infrastructure/NOC teams NOW. Find a platform that your Service Desk will thank you for! ServiceNow, as an example, has made great strides alleviating the burden in a few ways:
Here’s where you get to capitalize on the CMDB, process and policy work from the start of our journey. Now that the make-up of your infrastructure is trusted through your populated and well-kept CMDB, it’s time to add some visibility.
So, now you understand the dependencies within our infrastructure, but how do you get visibility into how the business services (like Email, ERP systems, CRM) are mapped?
Now that you have visibility, the next stage is to move toward a proactive IT operation. By the time you get to this stage, you already understand how your infrastructure truly “supports the business.” But there’s still manual work. There’s still a hint of a reactive mindset as well.
Most organizations will have monitoring tools that identify events surfacing across the environment. While that’s great already, it can be cumbersome, sifting through the noise and swivel-chairing to assign incidents. The upper echelon proactive IT teams are:
In some cases, they’re even automatically remediating certain events based on the business rules and guidelines they’ve set up.
A very similar approach can be made for SecOps teams, as they look for vulnerabilities and work to improve patch management.
This is the final stage of the journey where IT can start to position itself as a major hero in the business. At this stage, they must start to focus on areas like:
That’s it! That’s all you have to do! The hardest part, though, is knowing where to start and where to go next. And hopefully, this article clearly lays that out for you.
In our clients’ most successful transitions, we’ve seen a solid 1-2 year roadmap. And most often, it has played out as we referenced above.
If you’ve had time to step away from the fire(s) for five minutes, know that Synoptek has been improving Service Management for their clients for the last two decades. We’re here to help you take that first step!
Contacts us now!
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