Enamul Haque's Blog - Posts Tagged "devops"
The Use of Artificial Intelligence in ITSM Practice
The stunning promises to improve IT service management through artificial intelligence (AI) have been turning heads for quite some time. For the last couple of months, I have been heavily involved in getting the cloud operations run team mobilised with automation at its core. It's a gigantic project for a life-sciences company towards a colossal move to digitisation. During this troubling time of the pandemic, this project took my heart and soul.
The automation leveraging next-gen, chat as a medium for operations, collaboration and communication. Seamlessly integrating business users, developers, operations teams, cloud providers and BOTs and all in real-time.
But despite the genuine advantages that AI offers in an ITSM environment, the IT teams responsible should carefully check whether the use of the technology is really worthwhile in their specific case. They should also consider whether they can operate and support tools and processes based on AI.
While ITSM, in theory, has long promoted the entire life cycle of IT services and products - from the ideation of service to its decommissioning - many ITSM implementations only focus on ongoing tasks.
Many companies have set up a service desk and incident management as well as processes for answering inquiries. Others have defined a simple change management process that handles requests through a central approval point. Although these approaches have their own advantages, they are far from a comprehensive and holistic ITSM strategy.
With the emergence of new approaches such as DevOps, VeriSM, Lean IT and Shift Left in IT service management, frameworks such as ITIL, ISO / IEC 20000 and COBIT have undergone a significant revision.
Technologies such as Cloud Computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) , Containers, Microservices, Big data, automation and artificial intelligence require a fundamental revision of traditional ITSM processes. Another driving force behind the change in IT service management is purely business considerations, for example, the focus on customer and employee experience. Luckily, ITIL 4, proudly introduced XLA (Experience Level Agreements). XLAs are important in understanding the impact we’re having on the customer experience. XLAs can help us as an organisation develop our capacity for digital empathy.
Anyway, IT teams need to balance high responsiveness, which has become the standard in the digital economy, with organisational stability.
Artificial intelligence can improve or expand existing methods in IT product and service management. Most current AI-enabled ITSM systems focus on the following technical areas, with service desk and IT operations being the most popular use cases:
Service Desk: Relieves employees of tedious and repetitive tasks, such as the routine troubleshooting of recurring problems or answering inquiries.
Ongoing Monitoring: managing events with filters and disclosure of relationships.
Incident Management: Categorises incidents based on defined criteria, forwards tickets automatically or resolves simpler incidents without the need for human intervention.
Answering Inquiries: Answering end-user queries automatically, preferably via a self-service portal, including requests for all sorts.
Problem Management: Analyses large amounts of data in order to identify patterns and relate IT incidents to one another.
AI-enabled ITSM platforms can usually be divided into three categories: Reactive, Proactive or Predictive.
Reactive AI tools support the service desk primarily through self-service functions for the end-user. These tools are reactive because they only become active in response to a stimulus, for example, an alarm or human interaction. Examples of reactive AI in ITSM tools are chatbots and virtual assistants.
Proactive tools independently recognise a critical condition or an upcoming situation. They then initiate effective measures - for example, to resolve a necessary condition before an interruption in operations occurs. Automation, robotic process automation (RPA), and process orchestration tools are typical entry points into this category.
The third category is Predictive, predictive tools. They forecast future performance, demand or necessary work in the IT department. The forecast is based on an analysis of historical and current data. To make such predictions, some tools create new data sets from the collected data sets. Examples are ITSM tools that rely on machine learning and the evaluation of large amounts of data.
The fourth category of ITSM tools with artificial intelligence is currently emerging: Autonomous tools. They can make value judgments and take action that may have nothing to do with their original program. These platforms can recognise complex concepts such as risk-benefit considerations or the ethical effects of actions in ITSM and apply these findings. However, autonomous ITSM tools are not yet ready for the market.
The automation leveraging next-gen, chat as a medium for operations, collaboration and communication. Seamlessly integrating business users, developers, operations teams, cloud providers and BOTs and all in real-time.
But despite the genuine advantages that AI offers in an ITSM environment, the IT teams responsible should carefully check whether the use of the technology is really worthwhile in their specific case. They should also consider whether they can operate and support tools and processes based on AI.
While ITSM, in theory, has long promoted the entire life cycle of IT services and products - from the ideation of service to its decommissioning - many ITSM implementations only focus on ongoing tasks.
Many companies have set up a service desk and incident management as well as processes for answering inquiries. Others have defined a simple change management process that handles requests through a central approval point. Although these approaches have their own advantages, they are far from a comprehensive and holistic ITSM strategy.
With the emergence of new approaches such as DevOps, VeriSM, Lean IT and Shift Left in IT service management, frameworks such as ITIL, ISO / IEC 20000 and COBIT have undergone a significant revision.
Technologies such as Cloud Computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) , Containers, Microservices, Big data, automation and artificial intelligence require a fundamental revision of traditional ITSM processes. Another driving force behind the change in IT service management is purely business considerations, for example, the focus on customer and employee experience. Luckily, ITIL 4, proudly introduced XLA (Experience Level Agreements). XLAs are important in understanding the impact we’re having on the customer experience. XLAs can help us as an organisation develop our capacity for digital empathy.
Anyway, IT teams need to balance high responsiveness, which has become the standard in the digital economy, with organisational stability.
Artificial intelligence can improve or expand existing methods in IT product and service management. Most current AI-enabled ITSM systems focus on the following technical areas, with service desk and IT operations being the most popular use cases:
Service Desk: Relieves employees of tedious and repetitive tasks, such as the routine troubleshooting of recurring problems or answering inquiries.
Ongoing Monitoring: managing events with filters and disclosure of relationships.
Incident Management: Categorises incidents based on defined criteria, forwards tickets automatically or resolves simpler incidents without the need for human intervention.
Answering Inquiries: Answering end-user queries automatically, preferably via a self-service portal, including requests for all sorts.
Problem Management: Analyses large amounts of data in order to identify patterns and relate IT incidents to one another.
AI-enabled ITSM platforms can usually be divided into three categories: Reactive, Proactive or Predictive.
Reactive AI tools support the service desk primarily through self-service functions for the end-user. These tools are reactive because they only become active in response to a stimulus, for example, an alarm or human interaction. Examples of reactive AI in ITSM tools are chatbots and virtual assistants.
Proactive tools independently recognise a critical condition or an upcoming situation. They then initiate effective measures - for example, to resolve a necessary condition before an interruption in operations occurs. Automation, robotic process automation (RPA), and process orchestration tools are typical entry points into this category.
The third category is Predictive, predictive tools. They forecast future performance, demand or necessary work in the IT department. The forecast is based on an analysis of historical and current data. To make such predictions, some tools create new data sets from the collected data sets. Examples are ITSM tools that rely on machine learning and the evaluation of large amounts of data.
The fourth category of ITSM tools with artificial intelligence is currently emerging: Autonomous tools. They can make value judgments and take action that may have nothing to do with their original program. These platforms can recognise complex concepts such as risk-benefit considerations or the ethical effects of actions in ITSM and apply these findings. However, autonomous ITSM tools are not yet ready for the market.
ITIL 4 Value Creation and Service Integration And Management (SIAM)
Many things changed since 2007 when ITIL v3 was released. Today, as the role of IT in business changes, technologies such as cloud, mobile, IoT, AI, and blockchain are new opportunities to create value and build a competitive advantage. New practices such as DevOps, Agile, and Lean have also emerged to meet these opportunities. Due to these changes in the business environment, balanced management is required to connect “business” seamlessly and “IT”, stabilise quality, make it predictable, and realise prompt service value provision.
With ITIL 4, the concept of IT service management has expanded significantly and has evolved into a comprehensive enterprise-level framework. Although not explicitly stated in ITIL 4, the important concepts of ITIL 4 are “Service Value System (SVS)”, “Service Value Chain (SVC)”, “Four Dimensions of Service Management”, “Practice”, and “Value Stream”. So the idea of “Creating Value” is the heart of it.
Value creation from SIAM perspective could be compared to the manufacturing of a car. Different parts and components of a vehicle will not make any sense to anyone; they don’t hold much value until all these resources are combined with the skills and the work of employees at an automobile manufacturing plant, they become a drivable vehicle. This is how a car or a truck provides value to the business. SIAM helps business to extract value from its partners, suppliers and vendors by integrating them into a single entity with effective governance, measurement and continuous optimisation by removing supply chain complexity to service consumers as well as by uncovering hidden costs with single sourcing and move to value-worthy investments. This value creation contributes to the reduction of the risk of failure.
Value creation is also requiring acceptance of SIAM adoption. Service integrators are responsible for ensuring end-to-end services that were previously ambiguous, and service providers need to embrace new ways of working to fit these SIAM models, thus creating value. For example, before SAIM adoption, service providers are responsible for the delivery of each service, but they must accept that the service integrator is independent in directing, deciding, and governing, and the customer organisation must accept the service when contracting with each service provider. It must be made clear that the integrator is the customer’s agent. Also, value creation is a joint process for both the supplier and the consumer. It must be remembered that value cannot be provided if the consumer of value is not involved. And the supplier needs to understand what exactly is valuable to the consumer.
There are different aspects of customer value: desired value and perceived value. Desired value refers to what consumers want from consuming a product or service. Perceived value is the benefits that consumers believe they will receive from a product or service after the purchase. Customer value can be examined at different levels. At a low level, customer value can be viewed as attributes embedded in the product or service itself. At a higher level, customer value can be seen as the emotional satisfaction of achieving outcomes or customer desires when using a product or service. The supplier must provide value in terms of the parameters that are most important to its customer.
The appointment of a service integrator by the customer organisation is not limited to “internal procurement” that gathers members inside the customer organisation but may also take the method of “external procurement” that has the expertise of the service integrator. Furthermore, there may be a “hybrid” method that combines both, or a “lead supplier” in which some service providers are the service integrators. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, in the “end to end” value creation process. ITIL 4 value streams and value chains could considerably be mapped to SAIM activities. For example, the SIAM supplier onboarding/offboarding could be mapped to strategy management value chain, and supplier management value chain component, obtain/build value chain considers supplier data configuration to the service management tool.
One important thing to remember here that ITIL 4's Service Value System now includes 34 practices. If an organisation is planning to implement one or more of these practices, then it is by no means sufficient to conduct a SIAM process workshops and document the process. Rather, such skills must be approached as an organisational change project. By the way, organisational change management is also one of the new practices that was explicitly included in ITIL 4.
SIAM is approaching not only existing ITIL and service management such as ISO 20000, but also system development methods such as Lean, Agile, and DevOps, and COBIT, and how to coexist and expand the value of IT services.
With ITIL 4, the concept of IT service management has expanded significantly and has evolved into a comprehensive enterprise-level framework. Although not explicitly stated in ITIL 4, the important concepts of ITIL 4 are “Service Value System (SVS)”, “Service Value Chain (SVC)”, “Four Dimensions of Service Management”, “Practice”, and “Value Stream”. So the idea of “Creating Value” is the heart of it.
Value creation from SIAM perspective could be compared to the manufacturing of a car. Different parts and components of a vehicle will not make any sense to anyone; they don’t hold much value until all these resources are combined with the skills and the work of employees at an automobile manufacturing plant, they become a drivable vehicle. This is how a car or a truck provides value to the business. SIAM helps business to extract value from its partners, suppliers and vendors by integrating them into a single entity with effective governance, measurement and continuous optimisation by removing supply chain complexity to service consumers as well as by uncovering hidden costs with single sourcing and move to value-worthy investments. This value creation contributes to the reduction of the risk of failure.
Value creation is also requiring acceptance of SIAM adoption. Service integrators are responsible for ensuring end-to-end services that were previously ambiguous, and service providers need to embrace new ways of working to fit these SIAM models, thus creating value. For example, before SAIM adoption, service providers are responsible for the delivery of each service, but they must accept that the service integrator is independent in directing, deciding, and governing, and the customer organisation must accept the service when contracting with each service provider. It must be made clear that the integrator is the customer’s agent. Also, value creation is a joint process for both the supplier and the consumer. It must be remembered that value cannot be provided if the consumer of value is not involved. And the supplier needs to understand what exactly is valuable to the consumer.
There are different aspects of customer value: desired value and perceived value. Desired value refers to what consumers want from consuming a product or service. Perceived value is the benefits that consumers believe they will receive from a product or service after the purchase. Customer value can be examined at different levels. At a low level, customer value can be viewed as attributes embedded in the product or service itself. At a higher level, customer value can be seen as the emotional satisfaction of achieving outcomes or customer desires when using a product or service. The supplier must provide value in terms of the parameters that are most important to its customer.
The appointment of a service integrator by the customer organisation is not limited to “internal procurement” that gathers members inside the customer organisation but may also take the method of “external procurement” that has the expertise of the service integrator. Furthermore, there may be a “hybrid” method that combines both, or a “lead supplier” in which some service providers are the service integrators. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, in the “end to end” value creation process. ITIL 4 value streams and value chains could considerably be mapped to SAIM activities. For example, the SIAM supplier onboarding/offboarding could be mapped to strategy management value chain, and supplier management value chain component, obtain/build value chain considers supplier data configuration to the service management tool.
One important thing to remember here that ITIL 4's Service Value System now includes 34 practices. If an organisation is planning to implement one or more of these practices, then it is by no means sufficient to conduct a SIAM process workshops and document the process. Rather, such skills must be approached as an organisational change project. By the way, organisational change management is also one of the new practices that was explicitly included in ITIL 4.
SIAM is approaching not only existing ITIL and service management such as ISO 20000, but also system development methods such as Lean, Agile, and DevOps, and COBIT, and how to coexist and expand the value of IT services.
