June 4, 2019

I knew we were in trouble the day my dad, who is about as non-techie as you can get, pulled me aside one day and, in hushed tones, said, “So, I’ve been hearing a lot about all of this digital transformation going on. What do I need to know?”

The business and industry press now throws around the term digital transformation so freely that it is on the verge of losing any meaning — and worse, obscuring its real importance.

Despite the hype, digital transformation is the real deal. It is now a strategic and existential imperative that organizations transform their business and operating models and reorient around the customer experience to survive the transition into the so-called digital era.

Unfortunately, most of the talk about digital transformation fails to either address it in this proper, macro context — or examine the hard work that executing this type of transformation entails.

The less sexy reality is that this sort of wholesale metamorphosis puts an incredible amount of strain on IT operations. “Business stakeholders may not explicitly recognize it, but so many of today’s digital initiatives depend upon the reliability of IT operations to consistently keep business chugging along,” explained Ericka Chickowski, executive editor of Digirupt.io.

While most technology industry observers now agree that IT organizations will need to automate to have any hope of keeping pace and responding to the demands of digital transformation, the question is whether or not simple automation will be enough given the enormity of the challenges that IT operations teams are facing.

At least one organization thinks the answer is no — and that there is a missing link between digital transformation and how IT operations must function to truly support it.

The Big Fight in Front of Ops

Part of the reason that the situation is so challenging for IT operations is that while digital transformation is about improving the customer experience and making interactions between a company and its customers (and sometimes amongst customers and between customers and partners) simpler and more fluid — making that work underneath the covers has the exact opposite effect.

Delivering these sorts of seamless, integrated experiences has pushed the IT organization to adopt a vast range of technologies, rapidly move applications to the cloud, and iteratively push applications to production much more quickly using approaches like continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) — resulting in a vastly more complex and fast-moving technology stack.

This increasing complexity has also had a multiplier effect, increasing the complexity of the number of teams and the diversity of skill sets necessary to support it.

The result is a complex mess of an operational model that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, just as the demand for it increases.

“We’ve launched a slew of new innovative products recently and with that comes a new set of technologies and complexities,” shared Sanjay Chandra, CIO of Tivo. “This is a very common problem in the operations world: complexity of environments, ever-changing landscape of technologies and toolsets, and a desire to operate on a 24 by 7 basis. Couple that with user behaviors changing all the time and a global workforce and what you have is nothing less than extremely complex operations.”

Implicit in Chandra’s statement, however, is a sobering fact: IT operations teams have no choice, but to rise to the challenge.

Dealing with the complexity, the cloud, fast-moving and iterative development techniques, and distributed teams may be tough problems to solve, but they are essential to succeeding with digital transformation efforts.

But how?

Automation is Key, But Is It Enough?

There is a widespread and growing recognition that IT operations teams cannot continue to manage the technology stack in traditional ways and using traditional tools.

There is just too much complexity and too many systems kicking out too much data for mere mortal humans to make sense of it all. At the same time, the cost of missing something or taking too long to respond is rising exponentially.

It’s an untenable situation that has led many IT organization to turn to automation as a way to cope with the situation. As a result, they have adopted rules-based and automation point solutions to try to make things more manageable. The good news is that these approaches have helped — but is it enough?

“When enterprises launch new digital services and experiences today, they want to delight their demanding customers 24×7,” notes Assaf Resnick, co-founder and CEO at BigPanda. “It’s an impossible task for globally distributed IT Operations, NOC, and DevOps teams who face headcount, skills, and cost pressures like never before. The only option for IT leaders is to bring in trustworthy AI to augment their human teams, and cultivate what I call an automation mindset.”

As Resnick makes clear, simplistic automation will not be enough to help organizations cope with the challenges of complexity, agility, and distributed teams over the long-haul.

First, the severity of these challenges will continue to rise, meaning that simple approaches to automation will be unable to scale and will end up being nothing more than a stop-gap solution.

More importantly, however, as the stakes continue to rise, any time spent on monitoring, managing, and responding to operational issues is too much. Organizations will, instead, demand a technology environment that is self-driving and self-healing so that the focus can be on creating and sustaining value — not managing the technology stack.

The end-game must be more than just mere automation.

The Intellyx Take: From Automation to Autonomous Operations

Digital transformation is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not really about digital or technology, per se. Instead, it’s about delivering a seamless, individualized, and contextual customer experience. Inevitably, however, that requires technology.

Moreover, organizations cannot deliver such an experience by just cobbling together a set of technologies and hope that they work. Any hiccup in the technology supply chain that supports that experience impacts the experience itself.

Working backward from this point, therefore, it becomes clear that enterprises need more than just automation — they need to move toward an IT operational model that runs continuously and autonomously.

To do so, they must seek out tools and strategies that will help them achieve this autonomous operational state. “I believe BigPanda is among a handful of companies that are in the space that are leading the efforts to create a continuous autonomous operation,” mused Chandra. “As environments get much more complex, it becomes harder and harder to manage them. I don’t see a way to run a large, complex operation without a tool like BigPanda.”

This type of an autonomous operational model will result in a self-driving and self-healing environment that will enable IT organizations to strike the much-needed balance to support organizational digital transformation efforts. In fact, it may be the missing link that will help organizations finally achieve digital transformation success.

For more information on Autonomous Operations, click here.