Muhammed Omar, RSA Country Manager, ServiceNow.
Spare a thought for the IT pro. It’s safe to say that technology isn’t just an IT problem, and in matters like business acquisitions and strategic alignment, that’s certainly the case. But technology performance, usability and troubleshooting is This is a problem. This dynamic has reached a new level with digital transformation, and it is now setting a higher mark as organizations consider how to establish hybrid workplaces. These changes have knock-on effects that absorb IT resources and, if not addressed in time, reduce the effectiveness of employees.
There is no shortage of such disturbing experiences. A slow application or broken laptop often interferes with flow and productivity. Routine IT tasks, such as configurations, patching or password resets, can be disruptive and get in the way of a productive workplace. And when these things happen, most people turn to IT for a solution.
Today’s IT professionals are invaluable contributors to their organization’s success. They establish and maintain digital ways that enable companies to operate faster, smarter and more efficiently. But as integrated digital systems become more elaborate, support requirements are reaching the shoulders of IT teams. Every support ticket needs some attention, but doing so is not an effective use of IT professionals’ time. And time lost on support calls means less focus on the digital capabilities that make modern companies competitive.
AIOps is becoming a popular remedy for this situation, says Muhammed Omar, RSA Country Manager for ServiceNow: “AIOps is basically machine learning applied to the IT operations environment. You tend to get hundreds if not thousands of alerts a day. But do you know which are the most critical events that will have the highest business impact on your customers and employees – and you need to prioritize? AIOps helps the business really understand all the noise coming from events and logs, predict anomalies and identify the root cause.”
Self healing IT
The appeal doesn’t just end with managing alerts. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can help companies develop a concept called self-healing IT – remediating IT issues without human intervention. Self-healing IT stands on several building blocks, such as modernization, automation and optimization. With AIOps, companies design and maintain a platform for a self-healing IT environment.
AIOps and self-healing IT have become very popular thanks to cloud-based service and process management platforms. Gartner estimates that 30% of large enterprises will use AIOps platforms this year. IDC predicts that as many as 90% of large companies will use AIOps platforms within the next four years.
Omar is not surprised that cloud-enabled service platforms are at the heart of this revolution. They offer significant advantages over traditional and legacy service applications: “The biggest difference is that previous applications are fit for purpose, whereas a platform can serve many different purposes at once, especially when you use integration and automation. They can standardize data in one format and source. It brings together areas that typically have their own data and reporting standards, such as service management and IT operations management. And if you’re using a cloud platform, you can expect minor and major feature upgrades as part of your subscription. You don’t have to pay for new features, even advanced ones like AI, and you don’t have to run capex projects to bring applications fit for purpose features.”
Three steps to effective AIOps
Service operations management platforms open the doors for new opportunities in automating machine learning that learns itself when exposed to different service scenarios. For example, predictive intelligence can determine that Outlook-related errors should be auto-routed and assigned to the desktop support team, saving significant time and cost.
Since leading platforms have established templates for common AI workflows, it doesn’t take much to get started with AIOps and self-healing features. To get results quickly and maintain their effect, Omar suggests three main stages.
First, unify your service management and IT operational processes, technology and data on one platform: “That’s prerogative number one. You need to get the data in one place and make sure the data is of good quality. You can put all the AI and machine learning you want on top of that data, but you’re not going to get real insights if your data isn’t of a good standard.”
Automation comes second, and this is where the action happens – using AI-based automation, empowering employees with intuitive self-service, automating common requests to free up inundated agents and proactive containment on service issues. Get started by getting the right work to the right teams faster with AI-fuelled incident routing, reducing manual testing and delays. Then use AI to push relevant content — such as knowledge base articles and similar incidents — into a single workspace, providing automated insights that help agents solve issues more efficiently. faster and more accurate.
Once you have a solid foundation of data and processes, the third stage is optimization: “How do you improve processes? How do you provide closed loop feedback? And how do you ensure that there is improvement within the organization to deliver more with less. and more effective process?”
Using AI and machine learning to automate service management and operations reduces complexity and its reliance on human intervention. Facilitating best-of-breed service management platforms – that leverage the cloud, standardize data, continuously release new features and provide comprehensive closed reporting loops – make it easier to build self-healing IT.
“Companies are not afraid of AI and machine learning,” Omar said. “The goal is to use AI and machine learning as much as possible to get to a point of hyper automation. But where many get stuck is where to start? What is the journey to maximize the capabilities of AI and machine learning? What are the quick wins and use cases that we can use to make things faster, faster, better and automate? Platforms help answer those questions in a big way.”
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