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Pro-Active Problem Management = Value = ServiceOps + AIOps

Pro-Active Problem Management = Value = ServiceOps + AIOps

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Pro-Active Problem Management = Value = ServiceOps + AIOps

Every organisation practices Problem Management in one way or another.  IT systems do not run without hiccups.  Every system has flaws that could potentially result in downtime, errors, or degraded service. 

Technical support will be collaborating on what went wrong on a daily basis.  Kudos to them as they are practicing Problem Management – investigating and fault finding. 

This however is just one facet of Problem Management.

ITIL defines Problem Management as the cause or potential cause of one or more incidents.

Not all incidents qualify to be investigated as a Problem – typical incidents that have a major impact or re-occurring incidents will fit the bill.

If the incident or incidents occurred already, teams will be investigating what caused the Incident.  These teams are practicing Reactive-Problem Management.

Reactive Problem Management performs investigation on existing incidents, understanding root causes and attempt to create known errors, work arounds or potential permanent solutions.

Organisations typically do fairly well in Reactive Problem management, but many lack the maturity or have the required resources to perform Pro-active Problem Management.

Pro-active Problem Management focusses on identifying and potentially solving Incidents before they occur.

Automation and data driven actionable insights become key in maturing organisations to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.  This holds very true for Pro-active Problem Management.

Pro-active Problem Management relies heavily on analytical data from various sources:

  • Historical Incidents
  • Historical Changes
  • Historical Event Management Data
  • Historical Capacity Usage Data
  • Historical Security Vulnerability Data

These data sources mentioned will provide insights into what has happened historically.  This will be a great source for Problem Managers to understand patterns i.e., Incidents that occurred after changes were made, or events that occurred on specific days of the month – maybe during month end bill runs, or even when systems have capacity challenges.

  • Problem Management can use this data to predict potential incidents – Problem Identification
  • Problem Management can use this data to create potential work-arounds, known errors – Problem Control.
  • Problem Management can use this data to create permanent solutions – Error Control.

AIOps, ServiceOps and Problem Management

With the introduction of AIOps a lot of the predictive analytic work will be done in the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities of your IT Operation Technologies. The wealth of information available in AIOps will enable Problem Managers to easily identify potential Problem Investigations. The result is potential Incident avoidance.

Breaking down organisational silos between Service Management and IT Operations is not only key for Problem Managers, but it also helps creating a unified ServiceOps strategy which is a must for maturing Digital Enterprises.

Technology enabled ServiceOps benefit from shared data, workflows and collaboration between Service Management and IT Operations.

BMC’s approach to ServiceOps extends beyond simply combining IT service and IT operations management.  BMC Helix Platform empowers organisations to modernise business processes, accelerate DevOps, integrate intelligence for faster, better decisions and strengthen collaboration across lines of business.

 Some benefits realised:

  • Unifying data across your enterprise environment and processes result in reducing repetitive processes which increase speed to resolution and desired business outcomes
  • Pro-actively service the environment before challenges occur using predictive Service Management
  • Reduce siloed IT – bringing Service Management and IT Operations together resulting in better collaboration, quicker time to respond and resolution and automate everywhere

The future of Problem Management lies in a unified ServiceOps Strategy.  Organisations embracing this strategy, implementing technology ServiceOps and motivating resources to focus on Pro-active Problem solving, ensures an agile, more stable IT, cost reduction, better customer service and higher customer satisfaction.

Pro-active Problem Management is one of the key steps in maturing your organisation to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise by applying the 3 key trades of success. – Agility, Customer Centricity and Actionable Insights.

For more information on BMC’s ServiceOps strategy and Pro-active Problem Management: 

https://www.bmc.com/it-solutions/serviceops.html

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Season’s Greetings – The Automation Elves are hard at work

Season’s Greetings – The Automation Elves are hard at work

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Season’s Greetings – The Automation Elves are hard at work

This blog is maybe a little less technical in nature…intentionally so.  In the coming months we will delve into some of the topics I touch on in this opinion piece and how we can help you build amazing experiences for you and your customers by connecting people, processes, technology, and data.

Holiday seasons are all about love, laughter, giving, and being together with family.

Christmas time’s joy and festivity are infectious.

Every shop you enter and every time you switch on the radio (I am still old school) and every time you have an online experience you are reminded it is holiday time.

Technology, data, and lots of science go into giving you these experiences without you even noticing.

I thought about the looming festive season and listened to everyone’s holiday plans… Very interesting and quite welcoming, it is clear that people want to reset and disconnect from the rat race and technology-infused daily lives. It ranges from travelling, relaxing on the beach, spending time in the kitchen, gardening, exercising, and socialising.

Application and data orchestration are critical to many businesses that will make this possible. Retail, banking, and travel & logistics businesses are pivotal to making these holiday plans a reality and an amazing experience.

Retail and the importance of automation

Retailers, online and in-store, are leveraging huge amounts of data to ensure they reach the right person with the right product through a plethora of channels. Digital experiences are becoming more prevalent with people not even realising that their low-tech/no-tech experiences are touching intelligent automation ecosystems. By automating application workflows with BMC Control-M, retailers can create amazing new customer experiences and improve profitability…and make sure the gifts end up under the tree. Have a look at the various use cases and how Control-M makes this possible for retailers around the world. https://www.bmc.com/it-solutions/control-m-retail.html

Logistics and the role of automation

Some of you will be travelling or moving important cargo. This requires careful planning and coordination of multiple events and stakeholders. For people to get to their holiday destination or for that valuable package to get to its end point in time, the processes and data need to connect and move seamlessly across the entire value chain.

This involves complex processes, just-in-time analytics, and moving files and data across diverse ecosystems. Santa and his little helpers know all about this 😉…
Control-M ensures that this happens behind the scenes in a controlled manner regardless of the technologies involved. Have a look at the supply chain automation examples and how various industries rely on Control-M daily.

Banking and how automation is critical to enabling giving and spending experiences

making payment… The banking industry is being revolutionised with interesting partnerships between modern FinTechs and traditional banks and a move to a cashless society. The innovations in modern banking systems are highly dependent on automation and orchestration of its full stack of banking services, and now beyond the borders of its own business into that of its partner ecosystems.

See how Control-M turns financial complexity into a competitive advantage.
https://www.bmc.com/it-solutions/control-m-financial-services.html

During this festive season, you will be touching many of these automations without intention and without even thinking about it.

When you are sitting on the beach or under a big shade tree, remember to switch off for a while, breathe and take in the love of the season…

You can rest assured that automation is in action behind the scenes ensuring that Christmas dinners, travelling, and reconnecting with loved ones can happen unhindered.

Looking forward to a prosperous new year with all of you. Please contact me if you want to explore the possibilities and opportunities that BMC Control-M can help you unlock in your business.

Season’s Greetings… Andre Esterhuysen – Digital Business Automation Consultant, New Island Technologies

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Spreading a little more love this holiday season

Spreading a little more love this holiday season

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Spreading a little more love this holiday season

With the holiday season upon us, many are not fortunate enough to experience the love from families, the presents and the warm meals we all look forward to.

As the Hearts with Hands foundation, we strive to ensure that we make a difference, whether big or small and try to put a smile on peoples faces. We also want to encourage others to take this journey with us.

The Cradle of Hope Foundation has been kind enough to allow us to share the spirit of the holiday season with them. With the graduation season that happened, it was fulfilling to see the children end it off with a bang!

Hearts with Hands contributed to the children’s graduation, along with their parents, by sponsoring a nice lunch at Spur which took place on the 3rd of December 2022. With such a huge celebration for the children, it would only be right to end their day with some laughs, good food and bonding time with the family.

Being a part of the Cradle of Hope family this year has been such an eye opener for us at New Island Technologies. It has allowed us to be more grateful and to enjoy giving even more. This journey has been exciting and fulfilling and I cannot wait to see what 2023 has in stall for us with our new family.

If you would like to spread the joy this holiday season, please visit the https://thecradleofhope.org.  

From us at New Island, we wish you a happy holiday season filled with love, joy and happiness and a scrumptious new year!

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DataOps- Getting the most out of your data

DataOps- Getting the most out of your data

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DataOps- Getting the most out of your data

As businesses grow, expand and evolve, so do the levels of innovation, technology complexity and customer demands.

This drive for growth is supported and enabled through leveraging of data within the extended business environment, driving knowledge and insight.

The business is fuelled to know more about its customers, their needs and their behaviours.  This all to elevate the customer experience and to grow the business.

+ Manufacturing businesses are expanding their value chains.

+ Retailers are becoming financial service providers.

+ Banks and FinTech’s are becoming new best friends.

+ The industry is changing fast and it’s realising the value of combined data assets.

In the previous article we looked at the different maturity levels.  In the Intelligent automation maturity level, we get Data Driven Businesses. 

The data ecosystem is growing in size and value.  The reason is that the value of the data, when used correctly and combined with more data, rises exponentially. The growth in size and volume will most likely not stop and privacy, security and resiliency become critical to manage – and an Automation Platform can help.

In the McKinsey report on “The data driven enterprise of 2025”, they highlight the importance of well governed self-service access and automated data provisioning to protect the data without blocking access to this vital asset.

This is where DataOps come in…remember:  it is not the data, but rather the flow and use of the data that creates value.

To better understand this differentiating approach to data pipeline management and extracting value from the data, we need to first understand the challenges businesses are facing and managing the data pipelines today.

 

Some of the challenges that businesses face today that holds back progress and slows time to value can be found here:

  • “shadow IT” – Self-sufficient business units may seem like a great idea, but gone unchecked, will create a multitude of data automation islands that make it impossible to leverage the combined value of your data assets.
  • Application centric instead of service centric – Each application owner will see the world from an application centric perspective without acknowledging that business services span multiple applications and systems to deliver business value.
  • Dev without the Ops – Developers are wonderful, intelligent, and creative beings (been there, done that and hugely respect the trade). They believe that developing everything is possible, not realising that development effort spent in the wrong place will detract from developing FOR the business value.  Often these home-grown solutions will impact the Ops team in that it is time-consuming to support, manage and maintain – and IT Ops need to support a multitude of these as they come into production.
  • Every application subject matter expert will tell you they’ve got this – this relates to your core business applications. You will find some data and application automation and scheduling capability in many of the enterprise applications that does a good job within the realm of THAT application but fails to suitably and easily extend to the rest of your critical business applications, thus forming more islands of automation.

Problems that organisations are facing:

  • Data Leakage – manual or scripted data hand-offs that go unchecked
  • No agility – slow and costly to deliver value to business
  • Many different tools – need diverse skills to be involved in even the simplest projects
  • New technologies – adding more islands of automation, thus perpetuating the problem.
  • No end-to-end visibility of critical business services

Taking a platform approach to Automation – Building out the Automation CoE

 

BMC Control-M help you do this…

Control-M offers a framework for application and data workflow orchestration across all of your environments.

BMC Control-M will help all teams across your business to maximize the value and gather critical insights from your data assets in a seamless, simple, and controlled manner.

BMC Control-M offers key capabilities to help you make the most of your data through effective data pipeline orchestration:

  • Convert raw data into insights and actions by orchestrating complex data pipelines
  • Monetise data with insights, bartering, brokering, and business intelligence
  • Ensure data compliance with data quality best practices
  • Protect privacy with governance tools
  • Automate workflows for improved visibility and control of the entire data pipeline
  • Leverage predictive analytics to ingest, store, process, collect, and analyse data
  • Use performance, management, recovery and cost optimisation solutions to keep mainframe-based applications running 24×7

The Benefits of applying DataOps in your business:

By setting a platform approach in place you will eliminate the current operational islands, challenges and blind spots in your application and data workflows.

You will remove the integration blockages that keeps on creating technology and business silos, which in turn will help you unlock new value from your data through seamless Data Pipelines.

If you would like to unlock new value, reduce operational and development complexity, and find freedom of DataOps through the right automation framework reach out to me…let’s have a coffee and talk about levelling up your data pipelines.

André Esterhuysen – Digital Business Automation Consultant, New Island Technologies

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DIGITISE THE WORKPLACE – IT NOT ONLY MAKES SENSE BUT IS A MUST FOR THE FUTURE WORKFORCE.

DIGITISE THE WORKPLACE – IT NOT ONLY MAKES SENSE BUT IS A MUST FOR THE FUTURE WORKFORCE.

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DIGITISE THE WORKPLACE – IT NOT ONLY MAKES SENSE BUT IS A MUST FOR THE FUTURE WORKFORCE.

The last couple of years probably have seen the biggest changes in the way we work.  Within weeks we were confined to work from home without forewarning or preparation.  This phenomenon however did not change back to the old normal. 

According to studies from Bloomberg and Morning Consult, more than a third of adults interviewed would quit their job if they were not given a remote work option.  This percentage increased even more with younger workers – 49%.

Organizations therefore are forced to have a Digital-first strategy, enabling the remote workforce and remote consumers of services.  This can be accomplished by implementing a Digital workplace.

A Digital workplace is a central, go-to place for employees to access information and get access to services – all in a self-help environment.  Consumers of this self-help environments demand access using any device or platform. 

The Digital workplace should expand beyond just IT Incidents and cover the entire service stack including HR, Legal, Facilities – A single go-to place to access a Catalogue of Services is required

According to studies from Bloomberg and Morning Consult, more than a third of adults interviewed would quit their job if they were not given a remote work option.  This percentage increased even more with younger workers – 49%.

Organizations therefore are forced to have a Digital-first strategy, enabling the remote workforce and remote consumers of services.  This can be accomplished by implementing a Digital workplace.

A Digital workplace is a central, go-to place for employees to access information and get access to services – all in a self-help environment.  Consumers of this self-help environments demand access using any device or platform. 

The Digital workplace should expand beyond just IT Incidents and cover the entire service stack including HR, Legal, Facilities – A single go-to place to access a Catalogue of Services is required.

Modern Digital workplace solutions provide self-service capabilities powered by Artificial Intelligence and even have the ability to understand intent when using Chatbot capabilities.

Implementing a Digital Workplace however is not just enabling access to end users or consumers.  Careful consideration is required of the services to be published and how the organization will support the fulfilment of these services.  The Digital workplace becomes the eyes(entry) into the heart(operations) of any organization. The fulfilment of the requests is as important as enabling the self-service capability.

According to Gartner 56% of employees prefer to solve IT related problems themselves.  This number is increasing with the influx of millennials who demand the latest in technology to perform their functions from anywhere, at any time and on any device.

Benefits realised when implementing and transforming to a Digital Workplace:

  • People first – Organisations becomes People centric
  • More agile and engaged employees
  • Better communication and collaboration
  • Reduction in ServiceDesk engagements resulting in cost saving
  • Improved accuracy for request made
  • Quicker time to resolution
  • Improved Job satisfaction
  • Risk reduction

Implementing a Digital workforce requires executive sponsorship, a clearly defined project, knowledge, technology and a cross line-of-business approach.

A few considerations when enabling a Digital Workplace:

  • Analyse current Service Desk Contacts and transform those to self-service via the Digital Workplace
  • Start with Critical Services
  • Create a Unified Enterprise Service Catalogue – not just IT related requests
  • Create a consumer like feel – this will provide a familiar interface and minimize training requirements
  • Defined Entitlements – not everybody should have access to all catalogue items
  • Ensure Knowledge articles are published, maintained and accessible
  • Digital Workplace should be tightly Integrated into organisational processes
  • Encourage the use of Self-Service
  • Only implement Chatbots when the Service Catalogue is functioning, has matured and used by the majority of employees

The way of work has changed, employees demand quicker and easier access to information and services.  Enabling a Digital Workplace is not a nice to have – it is a necessity.

Please reach out to Marten van Heerden at New Island Technologies to explore the possibilities that can be unlocked by enabling a digital workplace.

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HEARTS WITH HANDS: MAKE PEOPLE SMILE AGAIN!

HEARTS WITH HANDS: MAKE PEOPLE SMILE AGAIN!

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HEARTS WITH HANDS: MAKE PEOPLE SMILE AGAIN!

Often, we define love through our experiences, people we come across, what we do and even what we simply like eating. On some days, love can feel very difficult to comprehend and to be a part of. But for us to understand love holistically, we need to be cognisant of how we show it to those less fortunate than us. It could be as small as donating an old T-shirt and pants you don’t wear anymore or going to spend some time at a shelter and be around others.

Hearts with hands

In 2022, New Island Technologies embarked on a journey of giving back. Apart from CSI and having a ‘moral’ obligation in the business world to give back, this journey was sparked by the love the team grew into and shared with each other. Our tradition, before starting any meeting, is finding out how everybody is. Mentally, and emotionally. Since the COVID 19 pandemic which CHANGED many lives, our sensitivity and compassion to each other and others grew immensely. In this, we wanted to do more. i mean love is a never-ending feeling, right?

As stated before, upon our journey to give back, we started an initiative called Hearts with Hands. We firmly believe that to give back isn’t a deed that in turn makes you feel good, but that brings a smile to millions of people’s faces. This initiative serves to help many underprivileged people.

 

“Be someone’s strength. Be someone’s inspiration. Be someone’s reason to never give up.”

Melodie van Brakel IS that strength, inspiration and reason.

We have partnered with The Cradle of Hope which is an NGO that is located in the poor suburb of west Krugersdorp. It is a foundation that helps underprivileged women and children. https://thecradleofhope.org Visit their website to find out how you can also be a part of spreading the love and taking this journey with New Island Technologies and Hearts with Hands.

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