Operations are the key to business success. A company’s success can be judged by its customer satisfaction and its revenue over time. Many businesses are looking for ways to optimize their operations and simplify their processes to help them scale their services and ensure client satisfaction. One way that businesses are doing this is through next-gen IT ops.

Adopting Next-gen IT Ops

The digital world is constantly changing. It’s no longer enough for businesses to offer an outstanding solution with great customer service. Today, business leaders are looking for the best-in-class ecosystem, which is running efficiently. They need to go next-gen or risk being left behind. They have a simplified ecosystem, which is flexible, scalable, and meets the demand of the business. Finally, it does not impact the bottom line as it creates an ecosystem where you can go back and pay for only what you consume.

It also allows all cross-functional teams, such as applications, infrastructure, and other lines of business, to come together. It creates a single source in the ecosystem, where these different groups can reside harmoniously and be homogeneous without impacting each other. Even if the maturity level for each attribute is different, it can still function perfectly.

Next, it creates a dynamic and agile operating model because it operates in three different dimensions: complexity, maturity, and cost. Furthermore, the integrated approach gives us a seamless way of understanding how the ecosystem is performing. Finally, the rapid capability development based on a standardized approach ensures that the template and patterns developed gives businesses the maturity they need.

Following a New Approach to Managing IT Operations

We see that Next-gen IT ops can help businesses of all shapes and sizes in different industries balance innovation, speed, and stability. It, in turn, improves a company's competitiveness. So, how do you go about implementing such an approach?

We would start by reviewing the baseline IT ops, such as infrastructure and application support. It helps us understand the level of maturity for a different aspect of the business and gives us a baseline that we can adopt. Next, we identify how the operations can be transitioned to support the Next-gen cloud-optimized application development and testing functions to establish end-to-end operations, giving the client a comprehensive solution.

So, now the key aspects of the design are what you will keep in mind as you define this strategy. It is a conversation that needs to happen with a company’s Chief Information Officer (CIO). As service providers, we have the framework and know the different elements needed. But unless we sit down and have this conversation with the company’s CIO, we will not know how to define the plan and outline the key priorities for the next couple of months and plan accordingly. Through this conversation, we understand the following principles better and see how it fits into the company’s larger strategy.

• Customer journey - The choice of channel, customer touchpoints, and customer outcomes.
• Insight and analytics - How a company conducts its process intelligence, data management and reporting, and its automated decision ability.
• Technology and systems - The existing IT architecture, digital solutions across the value chain and the digital workplace.
• People - The roles and responsibilities of employees and the entire workforce management.
• Optimal delivery - How the shared services are enabled by Centers of Excellence and distance work models.
• Operations and process - The company’s ownership models, ways of working, process metrics, and business outcomes.

Once the identification of key stages and the design principle is complete, it is time to define the resolution path, which directly maps to individual situations of the customer. We map it to the short-, medium-, and long-term objectives of the business and look at the projected capability steps in this customer journey by identifying the journey and its milestones. We will look at what already exists in-house in terms of people, processes, and technology. We will assess what can be reused or modified, what needs to be introduced, and how all these separate elements can be aligned to the objective.

Making Operations more Agile and Businesses more Competitive

When we start building an ecosystem like this, we don’t need to do everything at once. We need to prioritize. Having that initial conversation at the CIO level will help you understand this. Sometimes, business leaders may want a small fix or what I call “duct-taping” for some critical solution. In such scenarios, it is important to explain that while those quick fixes are possible, they may not align with their overall operations in the long term and create recurring problems. So, we need to go to the root of the problem, understand the pain points, and find solutions.

Your Next-gen ops strategy depends on the three important factors: complexity, maturity, and cost. While it is feasible to accomplish the end state, keeping the business goals in mind is essential. If a periodic assessment is not done, this experience can spiral out of control. The vital experience is identifying all the building blocks required and ensuring the milestones are tackled appropriately later. With the right IT ops strategy, you can also drive value for your business. Are you ready to get started?