Best Practices in IT Services and Operations: Six Steps to Improve Management

Digital transformation is undoubtedly the decisive factor for maintaining the leading position, maintaining the company’s competitiveness and providing good services to customers. But what should you do when your legacy is left behind? This is where proficiency in IT management can really help.

Companies with higher maturity in the IT modernization drive are achieving better results-although their initial financial commitments have increased, they will soon be able to shorten time to market for customers and reinvest in their core business.

But before getting there, the organization can easily get into trouble. It can be tricky to strike a balance between improving digital products and “keep going.” Common obstacles include running isolated operations, service availability issues, and the rusty end user experience of employees and customers who already hope to get a quality experience from the consumer applications they are used to.

Although this is by no means the simplest task, there are steps that organizations can take to organize their IT equipment. Together with ServiceNow, we will focus on six ways to success.

#1 Establish a centralized configuration management database (CMDB)

By creating a CMDB, your company can have a “single source of truth” in the entire IT assets, thus providing you with a system of record that can be used to better optimize IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operation Management (ITOM) functions.

In short, before you start trying to improve the entire setup, it is important to know where your assets are, where they are and how they relate to IT and business services. Someday it is better than nothing, so even if you only organize a few elements (for example, the network and certain services), it is already in a state of improvement.

How does this help? Just to name a few benefits: By knowing the state of the land, you will be able to better plan the delivery and release of changes. By providing snapshots of data and systems used for governance, risk, and compliance activities, this will also help in terms of compliance. Owning a CMDB can improve your core understanding of services and how IT provides them-allowing you to exercise greater control over IT assets that you own or are contracted by third parties.

Don’t feel difficult because of CMDB’s reputation. First deal with all possible CMDB use cases-then talk to different IT teams to get their perspectives.

Try to determine the ultimate goal required, and then work towards that goal. Focus on data quality rather than quantity-you want useful data instead of noise. Ensure that the CMDB not only allocates sufficient resources at the beginning, but also maintains it over time. If possible, please automate as much as possible. Finally, remember to protect your most important asset-your employees-because they can resist change.

#2 Discover infrastructure and business services

Now that you have a CMDB, it is time to populate it with information. We recommend starting with the discovery of the infrastructure and a clear picture of your IT assets. It is important to include hardware and virtual assets, plus cloud services (such as AWS or Azure cloud services) to get a comprehensive view. Think of this as a horizontal graph.

You can then start with service discovery to determine the business services to provide. Think of it as a vertical chart, or “service graph”, used to track the infrastructure on which these services depend. These intersecting diagrams will help you understand how changes in infrastructure will affect business services.

#3 Proactively identify service issues

Now that you have visibility, it’s time to use it. Outages are never desirable, but in today’s always-on world, any downtime can mean the loss of a large number of customers, so it is critical for the business to respond to these situations in a timely manner.

Using event management solutions and working with existing monitoring ecosystems allows IT teams to associate data with business services and configuration items in the new CMDB.

This can accurately reveal what is happening in your business services, and can provide high-level warnings for potential future problems-automatically generate high-priority events for the service team to investigate.

#4 wise incident response

When a problem occurs or a malfunction occurs, it is essential to quickly resolve the problem with the rapid notification of the incident. Speed ​​is of the essence, especially in major events. By using the platform provided by ServiceNow, rule-based routing will bring the problem to the right team-with the underlying CMDB, you can fully understand the history of the service and the affected infrastructure.

Now, team members assigned to issues can better monitor them and set up automatic alerts to flag any further issues.

#5 automatic repair

We will always need people, especially when dealing with complex IT issues. However, heavy tasks should of course be automated as much as possible so that employees can focus on their areas of expertise.

ServiceNow can provide IT support with the remedial information they need while letting IT operations know whether necessary measures have been taken. The orchestration function can be set up to make the repair work full of confidence-for example, if the web application problem can be solved by recycling the server in most cases.

Auto-repair also provides more intelligence, as the automatically generated logs can be filtered to identify recurring issues.

#6 A single view across IT services and operations

With all these basic tasks, such as a single recording system and in-platform analysis, it is easy to view all ITSM and ITOM activities in real time. With ServiceNow, customers can view the end-to-end activities of service management and operations management, including incidents, incidents or problems, discovered assets and service data, changes, and CMDB maintenance.

From the sixth and final step, the main efficiency of the organization can be improved, because the joint view can gain insight into the occurrence or time of the problem, thereby affecting your business, and helping to align operations and services more closely with business goals .

Expect to greatly reduce incident resolution time and reduce SLA violations. By automating data collection and reporting, your organization can save hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Not to mention thousands of hours of work using real-time reports and dashboards.

If you want to know more details, please check out ServiceNow’s three-part e-book series: 6-step methods for ITSM and ITOM to work better together.