As consumers demand more compelling, innovative, and customer-centric experiences that are also higher quality, the ability to deliver on those expectations can be a powerful competitive differentiator. Adopting DevOps processes; accelerating the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline; and increasing service quality through a more effective combination of IT service management and IT operations management (ITSM and ITOM) are some of the paths to success.
On that latter point, a new paper, Driving DevOps Success with Intelligent Automation and Analytics, captures Hanover Research survey results that show the usage of both ITSM and ITOM run separately continues to climb. It’s now 81 percent for each, an increase of six percentage points year over year for ITSM and seven percentage points for ITOM, but only 23 percent of respondents have already integrated the two disciplines. Eighty-one percent believe they would benefit from more extensive integration, 87 percent would like to have a unified view of ITSM-ITOM processes, and 44 percent already have a strategy in place to get there.
The BMC-sponsored survey collected input from 400 global IT decision-makers (ITDMs) and influencers about the trends and best practices driving digital business success and speeding their evolution to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE). An ADE embraces intelligent, tech-enabled systems across every facet of the business to enable agility, customer centricity, and actionable insights.
The survey report explores:
- The status and trends around ITSM-ITOM integration
- The priority list for converged ITSM-ITOM use cases
- How companies and business leaders handle ITSM-ITOM functions
- How companies currently apply artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics to their ITSM-ITOM processes
- How companies maintain and operate a change management analytics program
- The importance of data analytics to the key processes and components of change management
ITSM-ITOM Growth and Its Role in DevOps
ITSM-ITOM processes, teams, and technologies play a central role in DevOps success, and DevOps usage grew from 30 percent in 2019 to 71 percent in 2020. And executive leadership was more hands on in guiding that relationship, with chief information officer (CIO) involvement rising from 39 to 55 percent, chief technical officer (CTO) involvement increasing from 41 to 55 percent, and IT director involvement growing from 43 to 54 percent.
The survey also found that 69 percent of companies with a converged ITSM-ITOM are using emerging technologies for key use cases such as:
- Predictive alerting
- Prioritizing events
- Root cause analysis
- Predicting outages
- Service desk ticketing
The Importance of Change Management
Effective change management is integral to accelerating innovation. Eighty-three percent of those surveyed have established change management practices to help avoid poor decisions related to ITSM, with 78 percent incorporating data analytics and reporting that it positively impacted their ITSM positioning.
Eighty-four percent plan to expand their data-based change management capabilities in the near future and expect their change management analytics program to drive more frequent system changes. Applying automation to change management processes can also help enable digital success, and 83 percent of respondents understand that, placing strong importance on automating change management analytics.
Conclusion
To compete and capture opportunities in the growing economy, companies need to accelerate innovation while maintaining quality. The increase in ITSM-ITOM convergence and DevOps framework adoption is helping organizations manage change at the speed and volume of digital transformation; maintain service quality and uptime to ensure a good customer experience; and bring new services to market faster while becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.
To learn more, download Driving DevOps Success with Intelligent Automation and Analytics.
