Five Steps to Build a Process- Centric IT...

Five Steps to Build a Process-Centric IT Organization

GUIDE

xmatters.com | 25 STEPS TO BUILD A PROCESS-CENTRIC IT ORGANIZATION

When most people reach a fork in the road, they move

forward in one direction or the other. But when a Fortune

2000 retail firm embarked on changing its software release

process to a continuous delivery model, its IT department

had no such luxury. The ITIL initiatives which had driven a

large portion of investments over the last decade had paid

significant rewards.

But the software development lifecycle was in need of

an overhaul. Buyer engagement across mobile and web

platforms was growing faster than consumer visits at

physical stores. The retail firm gained an entirely new level

of understanding about its customers through e-commerce

metrics, but the data was only as valuable as the resulting

business decisions. Major software releases occurred a

measly three times a year, and they needed to occur at high

velocity to factor in the continuous market feedback and

drive revenue.

The firm formalized its strategy by announcing a digital

transformation initiative, and enabling its Enterprise

Architect with the discretionary and personnel budget to roll

out a continuous delivery model. The Enterprise Architect

invested in products across the DevOps toolchain, built out

a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, and allocated a

portion of developers’ time toward managing an operational

workload.

While these are classic DevOps plays, the changes brought

their own set of challenges. IT faced increased complexity

in its managed technology stack with the new product

investments. Product teams began to use their own DevOps

tools with minimal oversight. While teams became more

agile and moved faster, they also became decentralized.

Collaboration across teams waned. With all this taking place,

the IT organization found itself in quite a dilemma. It had to

balance agile initiatives designed for faster service delivery

with existing initiatives focused on compliance, performance,

and reliability. In such a scenario, how can IT be expected to

manage mounting business objectives, maximize technology

investments, and effectively position itself for the future?

The preceding customer story is indicative of broad

changes in the IT market. Gartner, Inc. states that by 2020,

50% of enterprises will entirely replace the tools they use

to support core IT operations management functions

with those originally used by DevOps teams. This makes

sense—because just like the IT team at the retail firm, IT

organizations across the board are tasked with moving

faster. And DevOps, at its core, is a culture shift to release

Reliability & Compliance

Agility & Velocity

A Unique Fork in the Road

GUIDE


products and services with agility and velocity. In fact,

Puppet stated in its State of DevOps report that high

performing organizations deploy multiple times per day

and have less than an hour of lead time for changes.

The challenge today is that IT is in the midst of its

“awkward teenage years.” IT operations can’t be expected

to embrace DevOps principles entirely when organizations

are still in the midst of DevOps adoption. According to

the 2017 xMatters and Atlassian DevOps Maturity report,

66% of respondents ranked at or below the intermediate

level of maturity. What’s preventing organizations from

maturing in DevOps adoption? People issues were isolated

as the biggest inhibitor to DevOps adoption by 50% of

respondents in a recent Gartner survey. To be specific,

resistance to change was the biggest barrier to embracing

DevOps, followed by skills gap and failure to collaborate.

So when you have resistance to change within an

organization, simply investing in tools won’t necessarily

affect business outcomes. In the xMatters and Atlassian

DevOps Maturity survey, 75% of respondents are

monitoring critical areas. Yet 50% of respondents reported

that code issues are still hitting production. It’s fair to ask:

if organizations don’t fully understand how to execute on

continuous delivery and DevOps, how can IT be expected

to support it?

xMatters has been working with customers and helping

them collaborate across all of IT for many years. This

experience has given us the blueprint for the best, most

proven method for IT operations to enable continuous

delivery (DevOps) while still supporting legacy initiatives

like major incident management (MIM) and ITSM.

The concept is simple: Map out the business processes

required to meet your stated IT objectives. Use the processes

to hone in on the data, tools, people, and teams required to

optimize existing workflow and drive change. Let users work

within their preferred systems as much as possible to minimize

change management. Benefits from doing so include:

• Better tool investments

• Structured and consistent collaboration

• Stakeholder alignment

• Elimination of redundant and overlapping work

• Subject matter engagement, without taking

unnecessary time away from “day jobs”

IT’s Awkward Teenage YearsBASE BEGINNER INTERMEDIATE ADVANCED EXPERT

30%

20%

25%

35%

10%

05%

15%

00%

15%

26%

19%

25%

15%

BASE BEGINNER INTERMEDIATE ADVANCED EXPERT

DevOps Immaturity: 66% of organizations ranked intermediate or worse in a 2017 xMatters-Atlassian survey of DevOps maturity adoption.

GUIDE


5 Steps to Build a Process-Centric IT OrganizationIntrigued by the benefits that can materialize from

optimizing processes managed by IT Operations? It’s

important that you follow a defined method to make your

IT team process-centric:

Most organizations are already doing the first three.

Let’s go over all five in detail.

1 Map Out Essential Business Processes

IT teams often make the mistake of purchasing (what

they think is) a checklist of tools and then trying to figure

out what do with it. And sometimes it’s hard to know where

to begin when evolving IT to support continuous delivery.

Without a proper business process strategy, it’s a lost cause

to integrate and automate tools and ensure collaboration

and data sharing between teams. Map out your essential

processes by defining business objectives, supporting

activities, managed entities, and response types.

Business objectivesDefining business objectives is the most critical, yet most

overlooked step to place processes at the nucleus of

your IT organization. Align with business and technical

stakeholders in your organization to hone in on what

matters. Prioritize the objectives to align with the IT

operations roadmap and progression path. Common

business objectives in the market include:

• Support multiple product deployments

over a given interval

• Reduce the number of major incidents

affecting customers

• Lower change failure rates

• Minimize lead time for product changes

• Maintain SLA standards of uptime

• Reduce developer time spent on unplanned work

Supporting ActivitiesAfter locking in your business objectives, map the

required set of supporting activities to each. Let’s see

how this works for “Maintaining SLA standards of uptime.”

Maintaining uptime requires issue detection early in the

software delivery pipeline and aggressive, rapid resolution.

Map out essential processes

Identify and connect process ecosystems

Operationalize steps for collaboration and resolution

Automate and curate manual work

Extract and archive contextual information

3

2

1

5

4

GUIDE


“Efficient curation is ideal for tasks

that have a defined set of triggers,

but can’t be fully automated

because they require a human to

determine next steps.”

The xMatters take: Some collaboration platforms want to house all your data and manage your workflows, which forces

you to choose only certain integration products. xMatters invites you to use the tools, processes, and workflows that you’re

comfortable with, and use the xMatters Integration Platform and Communication Plans to help them work better.

Supporting Activities: Each stage of the business process has specific activities.

1 Issue Identification Issue Resolution

Monitor application performance

Monitor infrastructure performance

Log application events

Detect anomalies

Detect symptoms and indicate possible causes

Bypass second-tier teams and engage technical teams

Engage available subject matter experts

Collaborate on problem to expedite resolution

Align internal and/or external stakeholders

Archive relevant learnings for future issue resolution processes

Raise flag to stakeholders

Isolate relevant information required for resolution

Issue Tracking and Management

2 Identify and Connect a Process Ecosystem

After mapping out your business processes,

you need to build a connected ecosystem to drive them

forward. This ecosystem consists of data, tools, people, and

teams. Similar to the previous section around identifying

supporting activities, you need to define and connect a

process ecosystem for each process that supports your

business objectives list. Let’s see how this works for the

example process we’re using around early issue resolution

to maintain SLA standards of uptime.

DataWhen it comes to data, understand the different types of

contextual information required for the managed process.

In our example, this includes:

• Monitoring insights • Anomaly information

• System logs • Issue status

• Issue collaboration • Remediation strategy

• Stakeholder communication

It’s important to understand that the above list consists of

both structured data (i.e. issue status) as well as unstructured

data (issue collaboration). We’ll dig into this subject later.

2 3

GUIDE


ToolsAfter solidifying the data requirements, choose the

required tools necessary to manage the process and data

flow. In our example, this includes:

• Application performance management

(New Relic, AppDynamics, Dynatrace)

• Event correlation (Moogsoft, BigPanda)

• Log management (Splunk)

• Anomaly detection (SolarWinds, ScienceLogic)

• Issue tracking (Jira)

• ChatOps (Slack, Stride, HipChat)

• Manager of Manager tools (Moogsoft, Datadog)

After you have the list of tools down, it’s important to

understand the respective entities they use for data

management and storage. In this example we have the

following:

• Exceptions

• Bugs

• Issues

• Chat channels or rooms

• External blogs (StatusPage)

• Internal blogs (Confluence)

When you manage complex processes that span multiple

systems, it’s critical to transfer the necessary information

across systems and between entities to keep processes

moving. An application exception that gets escalated into

a managed issue requires context from every system that

can provide visibility into the situation at hand. Taking a

process-centric approach lets the tools across your tech

stack speak the same language.

PeopleFor each managed process, isolate the people that need

to be involved. Use the following criteria to make sure

you’re engaging the right individuals:

• Skillset

• Geography

• Availability

• Languages

• Workload

• Business Interest

Be mindful of a few subtleties within the above list. Subject

matter experts will require a much deeper level of contextual

alignment when compared with business stakeholders. And

often, it’s necessary to make compromises on the preferred

level of expertise for people based on availability and existing

workload. That’s OK, as long as you have a structured way of

going to options B, C, and beyond.

TeamsTeams within the Development, Operations, and Support

functions need to collaborate in order to manage processes

to completion. The challenge is getting them to work with

other teams when they have their own established ways of

getting things done. The trick is to let team members work

the way they want to, so that they collaborate with other

functions without feeling like it’s outside of their day-to-day

flow. This way a developer can stay within Jira, while a help

desk manager can work out of ServiceNow on standard and

cross-functional processes.

The xMatters take: With more than 200 built-in integrations

and many hundreds of packaged integrations, xMatters

can connect any cloud-based services to your ecosystem,

freeing your teams to work the way they want.

GUIDE


Connected Processes: Releasing quality, innovative software quickly and providing outstanding support requires teams across the enterprise to share information across tools and work toward a common goal.

GUIDE


TOOLS TEAMS TASK

Log management n/a Log management tool sends application socket exception error

Log management, IT alerting Application Team or First Level SupportContact appropriate and available application team resource(s) to address problem

Log management, IT alerting Application Team or First Level Support Send application team resource(s) context to assess problem

IT alerting, issue tracking Incident Team or First Level SupportAfter confirming that it’s an important situation, application team resource creates an issue within tracking system to manage it

IT alerting, issue tracking Incident Team or First Level SupportApplication team member places details of problems within issue tracking system

IT alerting, issue tracking Incident Team or First Level Support Notify incident management team resource(s) to address issue

Issue tracking Incident Team or First Level SupportIncident management team resource takes ownership to manage issue

Issue tracking Incident Team or First Level Support Incident owner aligns with application team on next steps

Issue tracking, IT alerting, ChatOps

Incident Team or Network TeamIncident owner engages subject matter experts from Network team on issue via ChatOps

Issue tracking, IT alerting, ChatOps

Incident Team or Network TeamAvailable network engineer gets up to speed on situation and begins work on resolving

Environment dependent Network Team Network engineer resolves problem

Issue tracking, IT alerting Incident Team or Network TeamIncident owner verifies resolution and updates issue tracking system with status

Network, application, etc n/aAll systems for post mortem, internal and external status updates, and logs are updated

3 Operationalize Steps for Collaboration and Resolution

After establishing the ecosystem required to

support your set of IT processes, define the steps required

to facilitate collaboration and drive resolution. Doing so

will improve both consistency and efficiency each time a

given process comes into play. Let’s use our issue resolution

process as an example:

After solidifying the tasks, add the associated tools and teams

as detailed in the table. We can see that the process requires

engagement from the application team, incident team, and

network team. It needs a log management, IT alerting, issue

tracking, and ChatOps tool to be utilized. Mapping out the

rest of your processes in a similar manner is an effective way

to define the necessary technology investments.

The xMatters take: xMatters Communication Plans enable

you to build rules to manage your processes. Create

triggers for targeted messages to the appropriate people

to resolve issues and share data between systems so

people have access to the information they need. Let

workers subscribe to alerts and unsubscribe from others

to maintain information flow and reduce alert overload for

efficient and effective incident resolution.

GUIDE


4 Automate and Curate Manual Work

Operationalizing processes improves efficiency to

a certain degree, but you need to do even more to maximize

what’s possible. This is where automation and curation of manual

work is needed. For each managed process, drill down at the

task level to determine whether you can:

Fully Automate: Ideal for tasks that have a defined set of triggers

and can use software-driven logic to determine and execute on

next steps

Efficiently Curate: Ideal for tasks that have a defined set of

triggers but require a human to determine next steps

The following table drills into tasks from our issue resolution

example so that we can gauge levels of curation and automation.

It also shows associated triggers and response types.

The xMatters take: Automating your more routine processes is a

critical element of business efficiency, but automating everything

is not realistic. With xMatters, it’s simple to make changes on the

fly from individual and group scheduling to inviting more people

to collaborate to using more tools to solve a problem.

AUTOMATION LEVEL TRIGGER TASK RESPONSE

TYPES

Fully automatedException level in log management tool

Socket exception error routed to available and appropriate application team resources via email distribution list or chat

n/a

Efficiently curated Notification from IT alertingApplication team resource applies remedial action

Accept, Reject, Create Issue

Fully automated Notification from IT alerting Issue created within tracking system n/a

Fully automated Notification from IT alertingDetails of problems placed within issue tracking system

n/a

Fully automatedNew issue within issue tracking system

Notify available and appropriate technology team or first level resources to address the issue

n/a

Efficiently curated Notification from IT alertingIncident management team resource takes ownership to manage issue

Accept, Reject, Escalate Issue

Fully automated Notification from IT alertingUpdate issue tracking info with owner, producing unstructured data

Fully automated Notification from IT alertingIncident owner aligns with application team on next steps, pulling structured and unstructured data together

Efficiently curatedNotification from IT alerting and ChatOps invite

Incident owner identifies and engages subject matter experts from Network team on issue via ChatOps

Join ChatOps space

n/a n/a Network engineer resolves the problem n/a

Efficiently curated ChatOps communication

Incident owner verifies resolution and updates issue tracking system with status - collaboration involves verification of resolution, updates, engagement

Escalate Issue, Post to ChatOps, Resolve across systems

Fully automated Verification of resolutionAll systems for post mortem, internal and external status updates, and logs are updated

GUIDE


STRUCTURED DATA

UNSTRUCTURED DATA

Managed Issue objects

Application logs

Managed IT notifications ChatOps

FYI communications

Customer notifications

5 Extract and Archive Contextual Information

As you plan, optimize, and execute on your

business processes, it’s important to maintain a repository

of information for a number of reasons. First, you need

to have a complete perspective on any given process as

it progresses. Second, it’s important that you don’t re-

invent the wheel when faced with similar situations. Third,

stakeholders need access to different pieces of information

throughout the business process. The key to maintaining an

information repository is understanding the unstructured

and structured data types managed within each process.

Once you’ve identified unstructured and structured data

types, you need to map unstructured data into structured

data. Application log details need to be placed within the

managed issue and relevant IT notifications. The ChatOps

conversation should be placed within a structured data

source such as the issue so that any remediation insights

can be leveraged again for similar application exceptions.

The rule of thumb for aligning stakeholders is that business

and external (i.e. customers) stakeholders require data

from structured sources. They’re looking for information

around status and business impact. On the other hand,

subject matter experts that are directly involved in moving

processes forward often rely on unstructured data. They

need in-depth insights from system and application logs,

performance metrics, and other essential data points to

help them assess, resolve, or manage situations.

The xMatters take: Too often organizations close out an

issue, only to lose the chat conversations and steps taken in

various systems to reach closure. All that information could

be used to see the good and not-so-good decisions, build

a knowledge base, and improve performance over time.

With xMatters, you can preserve chat conversations, task

histories, and other information in the systems of record you

choose, to always be improving.

Sorting Data: In our issue resolution example, stakeholders need structured

data, while anyone moving processes forward needs unstructured data.

GUIDE


The conclusion of this paper should be the beginning of your

journey toward building a process-centric IT organization.

Figure out which processes you can fully automate and

which need human intervention, and let your employees

work in the systems they know and trust to help ease

resistance to change.

Next, extract and archive contextual information to help

technical teams take immediate action without having

to triage issues at every step in resolution processes. As

the xMatters-Atlassian DevOps Maturity survey shows,

organizations are gaining massive amounts of data from

their monitoring systems, but they are struggling to use the

data effectively.

Learn how xMatters can help make your IT organization

process-centric. As you define your business processes and

associated ecosystems, you’ll need a catalyst to manage

workflow and connect your data, tools, people, and teams.

xMatters delivers integration-driven collaboration that relays

data between systems while engaging the right people

for any business process. xMatters helps to automate and

operationalize business processes through trigger-based

communication plans. Actionable responses help team

members efficiently curate key tasks.

Enriched notifications provide subject matter experts with

the insights they need to effectively engage. In-depth

integrations allow unstructured data such as ChatOps

conversations to be placed within structured entities like

service desk tickets. Communications can be tailored for

various stakeholders and templated to ensure consistency.

Next Steps for Making your IT Team Process-Centric

Integrated Service: Integrating a collaboration platform like xMatters with a communication tool like Slack helps the service desk work with other parts of the organization.

COMMENTS

SERVICE DESK TICKET #1034

ABOUT US

Copyright 2018 xMatters. All rights reserved. All other products and brand names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

xMatters is a toolchain communication platform that relays data between systems while engaging the right people to resolve incidents. The platform automates,

operationalizes and contextualizes communications within key DevOps processes, fundamentally altering the way business units work together. xMatters also

supports enterprises through major incident and change management, alerting the right people on the right channels to time-sensitive events and problems

like network outages, supply-chain disruptions, natural disasters and medical emergencies. Founded in 2000, xMatters is headquartered in San Ramon, CA, with

additional offices worldwide. For more information, please visit xmatters.com.

https://www.xmatters.com/

Five Steps to Build a Process- Centric IT...

Documents

Transcript of Five Steps to Build a Process- Centric IT...