As more of the world moves to digital, the processes behind the scenes like IT service management (ITSM) are rapidly evolving to help companies support “always on” availability. That evolution is also critical to working seamlessly with DevOps teams.
The DevOps goal is to drive faster innovation and changes through a repeatable cycle of analyze, build, test, and deploy. For environments that are a mix of complex applications and services and an infrastructure that spans mainframe to cloud (and everything in between), technical debt, siloed toolchains, and myriad dependencies can complicate things.
In an ideal situation, DevOps teams move fast and freely, implementing lean, direct toolchains to drive a quick, resilient path from change initiation to deployment. Smaller companies and deployments may be able to work that nimbly, but for larger companies with more complex systems that require separate operations teams, it’s another story.
There’s a strong correlation between organizational success and the speed and agility of software development and deployment. To help advance DevOps initiatives, ITSM needs to transition away from its current, staid processes. That’s the key takeaway from Gartner® research published in Modernize ITSM to Meet the Demands of DevOps and Product Teams. According to the report, “the traditional ITSM processes that most organizations implement no longer meet the needs of product and digitally focused organizations.”*
Gartner recommendations for I&O leaders
Gartner has some recommendations for infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders on improvements they can make, advising, “I&O leaders must adapt, federate, and modernize their ITSM offerings or risk being ignored by the DevOps and product communities. As DevOps and product teams become more prevalent, I&O leaders need to oversee and maintain the quality of service. I&O leaders focused on infrastructure, operations, and cloud management should:
- Modernize the ITSM approach by aligning the needs of business users and key stakeholders with the demands of nontraditional practices such as DevOps and product management
- Refocus ITSM teams to enable and empower DevOps and product teams by creating a support framework that helps them effectively practice service management
- Establish an agile service delivery office (ASDO) to provide insight into service performance and improvement opportunities”*
To learn more about Gartner’s insights into modern ITSM, download Modernize ITSM to Meet the Demands of DevOps and Product Teams.
DevOps and BMC
While it’s clear that moving to modern ITSM processes is the way to go, where to start becomes the next question. BMC can help. We have a heritage of helping customers drive operational excellence in their business with solutions built to support large, complex environments that span mainframe to data center to cloud. We bring value to the DevOps process at large organizations by:
- Reducing the broader risks inherent to complex enterprise environments
- Handling governance, hardening, and automation through high-quality artificial intelligence for operations (AIOps) capabilities that do not impose work on DevOps teams
- Bringing the mainframe environment into the enterprise DevOps toolchain to enable faster development and testing
- Helping move to production faster by making application workflow orchestration part of the DevOps toolchain
- Automating the enrollment of DevOps-deployed infrastructure into additional value-adding services such as cost and capacity management
- Enabling shift-left of support activities to the scaled, high-quality enterprise support channel, reducing the workload for DevOps teams
To learn more about what BMC can do for you, visit www.bmc.com/helix.
*Gartner, Modernize ITSM to Meet the Demands of DevOps and Product Teams, Mark Cleary, Roger Williams, Duncan Prosser, May 7, 2021.
