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03/04/2020
Best Practices

How to use ITIM to make infrastructure and operations (I&O) more customer-centric

Blog How to use ITIM to make infrastructure and operations (I&O) more customer-centric

We’ve recently described what legacy IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM) is and reviewed the risk of maintaining the status quo. By definition and purpose, the digital organization is focused on services and value, while I&O is traditionally more an IT system expert than a customer-experience wizard. This post will help you bring I&O closer to their new mission within the digital business, providing insights into constantly improving end-user experiences.  

“I&O leaders, especially in the monitoring practice, have been laggards in adopting monitoring practices that can align well in an environment of faster deployment cycles.” – Gartner, Monitoring beyond 2020

The I&O struggle, ITIM at the rescue

The digital business is adopting the architectures and environments that will most efficiently serve customers, and it is doing so at an unprecedented rate. It is expected that over the 2020s, the IT environment will be even more crowded, with the explosion of IoT and edge computing, producing a high-velocity deluge of data to triage. I&O organizations are struggling to adapt to this new, highly complex and fluid environment, but a solution is within reach. ITIM may be a discreet ally, but it’s a powerful one. The discipline and the solutions available have quietly evolved over the years. ITIM now constitutes a readily accessible tool to gain a solid foothold in the new digital environment.

Why is modern ITIM a big part of the solution? Hint: it’s in the data!

No shocking news here: ITIM was always about collecting data. What’s changed really is 1) the value to be drawn for data in building better digital businesses, and 2) the ability of some advanced ITIM solutions to collect data at the infrastructure level as well as, through connectors, from a wide variety of sources, virtually eliminating siloes between the various I&O disciplines that generate their own stream of data: application performance monitoring (APM), Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostic (NPMD), and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). In 2020 and beyond, the data provides a golden opportunity to reshape I&O’s perspective from IT functionality to customer experiences and value. 

“The good news of the day: thanks to ITIM, I&O will have an easier ride aligning to business objectives.” 

Modern ITIM addresses modern challenges

Challenge Modern ITIM at the rescue
Disaggregation of IT architectures – combination of data center, cloud, hybrid cloud, virtualization, SDN/SD WAN – What can effectively be tracked and when?
  • Monitors 100% of the estate through integrations and automation.
  • Collects and aggregates the data from a diversity of sources. 
Customers are the direct “consumers” of the digital business’s IT infrastructure and services.

How can quality of service be effectively maintained and protected, safeguarding reputation and revenue stream?

  • Maps and correlates workflow with key business transactions.
  • Tracks user experience from the basic level of infrastructure.
  • Diagnoses incidents before they “appear” on customer service dashboards.
Highly diverse but synergetic environment.

Information is power: Who gets to know what?

  • A common and unique view of the entire ecosystem.
    Serves relevant performance reports to ITOps, DevOps and SecOps.
  • Demonstrate real IT value to line of business leaders.
    Engage all levels of the organization on business objectives.

 

3 planks to bridge I&O and business

  1. Discover where I&O has the most direct impact on business revenues and track key business transactions, from core to edge, for a direct, real-time view on how the system is running.
  2. Use aggregated data on key workflows to promptly remediate issues and recommend cost, performance and security optimizations.
  3. Map the services behind key customer metrics to measure and gain leverage on customer engagement.

“I&O can answer the questions of business leaders’ questions with the help of a carefully built IT monitoring platform.”

The “customers” of modern IT infrastructure monitoring

With IT infrastructure and services being consumed by a wide range of stakeholders, from the system administrator up to the intended business customer, the modern ITIM platform provides a full continuum of dashboards to inform on real-time IT service.

At Centreon for example, our customer use IT monitoring:

A continuum of dashboards to combine IT-centered with business-centered metrics 

How to Build an Ideal Performance Monitoring Dashboard
Published: 9 October 2019 ID: G00390283
Analyst(s): Sanjit Ganguli, Josh Chessman

How to get there? Passing the ball to your IT monitoring team 

Adopting a modern IT monitoring solution is a sure way to make some quick wins to align I&O with business objectives. Let’s have a conversation to build a great ITIM platform. You can also ask for a personalized demo.

Need to read some more?

See how ITIM helps sell burgers.
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