Unifying IT for Digital War Room Performance

IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Unifying IT for
Digital War Room
Performance
Dennis Nils Drogseth
Vice President
EMA

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING© 2018 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
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• Unifying IT for Digital War Room Performance On-
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INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING© 2018 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.3
Featured Speaker
Dennis Nils Drogseth, Vice President, EMA
Dennis joined Enterprise Management Associates in
1998 and currently manages the New Hampshire office.
Dennis brings several years of experience in various
aspects of marketing and business planning for service
management solutions. He supports EMA through
leadership in IT Service Management (ITSM), CMDB
systems, as well as megatrends like advanced operations
analytics, cross-domain automation systems, IT-to-
business alignment, and service-centric financial
optimization. Dennis also works over several practice
areas to promote dialogue across critical areas of
technology and market interdependencies.

Logistics
4
An archived version of the event recording
will be available at
www.enterprisemanagement.com
• Log questions in the chat panel located on
the lower left-hand corner of your screen
• Questions will be addressed during the
Q&A session of the event
QUESTIONS
EVENT RECORDING

Sponsors
6

Agenda
• Demographics
• Organization
• Strategic perspectives
• Processes (or lack thereof)
• Applications and DevOps
• The impacts of cloud
• General technology priorities
• War room metrics, obstacles and perspectives on success
• Concluding thoughts
7 © 2018 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

Demographics

Across 272 Respondents We Had a Balanced Mix of
Company Sizes
How many employees are in your company worldwide?
0%
5%
15%
23%
16%
16%
8%
16%
Fewer than 250
250 - 499
500 - 999
1,000 - 2,499
2,500 - 4,999
5,000 - 9,999
10,000 - 19,999
20,000 or more
Column %
Sample Size = 272

Other Demographic Highlights
• 56% North America, 44% Europe
• Lead verticals were high technology software,
finance and banking, high technology service
providers and MSPs, manufacturing and retail.
• The average IT budget was about $30 million, but
15% of respondents had a budget of $100 million or
more. Seventy-seven percent showed an annual
budget increase.

Other Demographic Highlights -2-
• Titles:
– 22%were director or above in IT with 11% CIOs
– 15% were non-IT business stakeholders with titles ranging
from CEO, to corporate line of business vice president, to
digital marketing officer.
• Respondents were required to have significant levels
of war-room involvement.
– Only 18% indicated occasional levels of involvement, and
54% indicated ongoing involvement.

Top Three IT Groups in War Room: IT Applications Development; DevOps;
IT Operations Planning/Design: But Ops is Tops if Added Together
You have indicated that you work for IT in some capacity.
Within this area, to which group do you belong?
17%
16%
15%
8%
7%
7%
6%
5%
5%
4%
3%
3%
2%
2%
1%
0%
Application development
Dedicated DevOps/agile team
IT Operations planning/design
IT Architecture
Project/program management
IT applications management/support
Operations - network operations center (NOC)
Operations - data center
Security/compliance
Architecture/engineering
Service Desk/Service Support/Help Desk
Endpoint and/or mobile management
Cross-domain application/service delivery organization
Cloud
Executive IT Management
Other
Sample Size = 197

Organization

The Trend is Clearly Toward a More Formalized and
Established War Room in the Digital Era
Which of the following statements best describes how your organization’s
digital war room has changed over the last two years?
47%
28%
22%
2%
0%
It has become more formalized and established with
coordinated teams and processes
It has become less formalized with more ad hoc teams
and processes
It has continued to have formalized and established
teams
It has remained ad hoc
Other
Sample Size = 272

Other Organizational Highlights
• 15 people are on average involved in the digital war
room for major incidents
– 52% are seeing more people involved than in the past; only
3% are seeing fewer people involved
• 39% of respondents affiliated their war room with the
Full-time Quick Response Center
– 30% with the NOC
• 70% have a single organizational owner
– IT Service Management (ITSM ) and executive suite lead
• With CIO involvement at 24%
– And director-level at 28%

The Average Respondent Assumed 3.62 Different
Roles in the Digital War Room
Which of the following reflect your current involvement in the "digital war room"?
40%
36%
33%
32%
32%
32%
32%
31%
30%
26%
20%
18%
0%
0%
Direct (hands-on) involvement from an IT service management (ITSM) perspective
Direct (hands-on) involvement from an application management perspective
Direct (hands-on) involvement from a network management perspective
Direct (hands-on) involvement from a systems management (including virtualized)
perspective
Direct (hands-on) involvement from a storage management perspective
Direct (hands-on) involvement from a cloud resources perspective
Direct (hands-on) involvement from a security/compliance perspective
Direct (hands-on) involvement from a development perspective
Direct (hands-on) involvement from a database management perspective
Direct (hands-on) involvement from an endpoint management perspective
Managerial oversight
I am a business stakeholder who is involved with war-room outcomes.
Other
None of the above - I am not involved in war-room decision-making.
Sample Size = 272, Valid Cases = 271, Total Mentions = 979

88% Had IT Operations Working With ITSM in the War
Room: Average = 3.25 Areas of Collaboration
Why?
– For change-related issues (37%)
– In response to trouble tickets (34%)
– By leveraging ITSM workflows for cross-domain support (34%)
– In support of security issues (34%)
– For leveraging the ITSM knowledgebase (33%)
– In support of end-point-related issues (33%)
– Operations-driven IT process automation + ITSM workflows (32%)
– For shared analytics (31%)
– For IT alerting (29%)
– In response to service-desk complaints (28%)

Strategic Perspectives

Only 6% See the Digital War Room as Becoming Less
Important in the Present/Future: Versus 50% Seeing it
Becoming more Important
Which of the following statements best reflects
how you see the digital war room?
50%
43%
6%
2%
Effective war room capabilities are becoming more
important in the digital era.
Effective war room capabilities remain at the same level
of importance in the digital era.
Effective war room capabilities are becoming less
important in the digital era.
I have no opinion.
Column %
Sample Size = 272

Some Other Strategic Perspectives
• Physical or Virtual?
– 31% primarily physical
– 17% primarily virtual
– 52% hybrid (50/50 physical and virtual)
• Most concerning performance issues:
– Network performance (47%)
– Database and storage performance (tied at 37%)
– Internet of Things (33%)
– In-house developed applications
and mainframe performance (29%)
– Public cloud infrastructure
performance (28%)

Other Strategic Perspectives -2-
• Top change, security or business concerns:
– Disaster-recovery-related issues (41%)
– Security-related alert identification and correlation, and
business impacts/business outcomes for internal
productivity and business process efficiencies (tied at
40%)
– Maintenance-related issues, and business
impacts/business outcomes for external customers (tied
at 39%)
– Changes made to the infrastructure, security-related false
positives, and application design issues (all tied at 38%)
• About 30% of incidents are currently diagnosed
before causing outages or disruptions
– And these are generally handled in the
war room (91%)

75% Show War Room Transformations Driven by
Technology– with Automation in the Lead
Which of the following best describes how your digital war room
has changed as your organization has entered the digital era?
24%
32%
19%
18%
6%
2%
Our war room has fundamentally remained the same.
Our war room has fundamentally transformed through
automation.
Our war room has fundamentally transformed through
analytics/AI.
Our war room has fundamentally transformed through a
combination of analytics/AI and automation.
Our war room has fundamentally transformed for other
technology-specific reasons.
Our war room has fundamentally transformed for
reasons other than technology.
Sample Size = 272

Processes (Or Lack Thereof)

Key Processes: On Average Only Half (2.57) Of
These Processes Were Defined
Which of the following processes are defined in your digital war room?
59%
67%
54%
45%
32%
0%
Initial awareness (events/complaints)
Response team engagement and
coordination/alerting relevant stakeholders
Triage/diagnostics
Remediation
Validation (testing results/final reporting and
incident summaries)
Other

Added Process Insights
• Response Team Involvement was both the most
defined and the most troubling process
• On average more than 35% of incidents are brought
forward via complaints from the service desk
• Average time for team assembly was between 1
hour and 1.5 hours
• Average time for resolving major outages was
between 5 and 6 hours
– But 20% were more than 11 hours
• 65% audit war room performance consistently
– Only 2% never do

66% Have An Incident Manager or Team
Do you have a defined incident manager or incident management team
to help coordinate digital war room response?
20%
46%
12%
21%
0%
Yes, we have a single incident manager.
Yes, we have an incident management team.
No, we do not have an incident manager or
management team.
We have a coordinator, but we dont call it "incident
management."
I don't know.
Sample Size = 272

An Automated IT Alerting System Led For Stakeholder Identification
The Average Response Indicated Use of 2.4 Different Tools.
39% Still Depend on Senior Management
Which of the following processes/tools allow you to identify the resolvers and
stakeholders relevant to a given incident/outage/performance issue?
48%
39%
34%
34%
30%
28%
26%
16%
0%
Automated IT service alerting system
Communication with senior management
ITSM-based trouble ticket-driven processes
On-call schedule system
Analytics-driven automated coordination
Linkage through CI-association in our CMDB or CMS
Runbook process definitions
We don't have a consistent process for finding out.
Other

Other ‘Process Toolset’ Highlights
• Top priorities for response coordination and
collaboration
– Email (55%)
– Phone (44%)
– SMS/text (36%)
– ITSM workflows (33%)
– Whiteboards (31%)
• Top priorities for auditing, tracking and governance
– IT alerting and response automation (46%)
– IT process automation or runbook (41%)
– Operations-driven monitoring or analytics (also 41%)
– ITSM workflow and governance reports (38%)
– Security-related analytics or reporting (35%)

Applications and DevOps

Top Application Concerns
• Most critical applications:
– IT services delivered to client organizations (37%)
– Hybrid apps spanning public/private cloud (32%)
– Packaged internal productivity apps (29%)
– Internal web applications (26%)
• Most troublesome applications
– IT services delivered to external client organizations (39%)
– Internal web applications (31%)
– Applications using non-HTTP clients (applets, forms, etc.)
30%
– Packaged internal productivity/business applications (29%)

Over Last 2 Years, 37% Have Seen More Development
Involvement in Digital War Room: Only 15% See Less
Over the last two years, how has Development worked with Operations
and other teams in digital war room decision-making?
37%
15%
32%
16%
Development has become more involved in war-room
decision-making
Development has become less involved in war-room
decision-making
Development's role has remained the same in war-
room decision-making
Agile/DevOps has led to a separate track for war-room
decision-making
Sample Size = 272

Average Response Indicates 2.46 Ways for Development and
Operations/IT to Coordinate
How is Development coordinated to work with Operations
and other teams in digital war room decision-making?
42%
39%
35%
35%
35%
31%
29%
0%
Development is alerted to incidents from a service
alerting system
Development and Operations both leverage shared
insights into end-user experience
Development participates via shared monitoring
insights with Operations
Development participates via shared analytic insights
with Operations
Development is alerted to incidents from our Service
Desk
Development is engaged via social media to work in
team mode
Development participates via shared KPIs and alerts
Other

The Impacts of Cloud

A Few Key Insights On Cloud
• The average respondent indicated about 20% of their
workloads were in public cloud
– While 15% indicated 50% or more
• 50% claimed cloud has made digital war room decision-
making easier
– 41% felt it was making things harder
– Only 9% saw no change
• For the 41% who saw cloud as making war room decision
making harder:
– 65% said cloud requires new skill sets and internal processes
– 43% said cloud challenged efficiencies due to migration issues
– 13% said cloud required new processes for working with cloud
service providers

Real-Time Service Performance and Improved Network
Security Led for Cloud-Driven Technology Requirements
Of the following technology requirements, which are most important
for optimizing war-room performance in hybrid cloud environments?
33%
33%
32%
31%
30%
27%
24%
24%
23%
22%
20%
Real-time service performance
Improved network security
Integrated security and performance
Integrated security and change
Continuous deployment/integration (DevOps/Agile)
Overall higher levels of automation
Capacity planning and optimization
Business impact/business outcomes
Understanding real user experience
Improved storage control and cost optimization
Change impact optimization

General Technology Priorities

Advanced IT Analytics and SIEM Led for Top 7 Most
Critical Technologies
Which of the following technologies are most critical
to your war room decision-making and resolution?
45%
44%
41%
40%
40%
40%
38%
37%
36%
36%
35%
35%
33%
33%
32%
32%
31%
28%
27%
18%
0%
Advanced IT analytics (AIA)/ IT operational analytics
Security incident and event management (SIEM)
Security threat intelligence and analysis
Endpoint instrumentation and analytics
IT process automation/runbook
Security endpoint forensics and/or next-generation endpoint security (NGES)
Workflow automation
Event management systems
Configuration automation and patch management
Change management/change impact awareness capabilities
Data aggregation and data management capabilities
Discovery/inventory/topology
Application/infrastructure dependency mapping
ITSM knowledgebase
Real user monitoring (RUM) or observed transaction analysis
Application release/provisioning automation
WAN optimization
End-to-end transactional reconstruction (across network, server, desktop, etc.)
Active (synthetic) transaction analysis
SD-WAN
Other
Sample Size = 272, Valid Cases = 272, Total Mentions = 1,904

More on Technology Adoption
• 59% are using advanced IT analytics or AIOps
– 39% plan to
– Lead heuristics were real-time predictive, process analytics,
security instrumentation, predictive trending and data mining
• 38% have intelligent bots deployed
– And another 38% have plans to within the coming year
• Capturing application and infrastructure
interdependencies was also key:
– Application-to-infrastructure; and infrastructure-to-infrastructure
led
– Only 3% were not using dependency mapping in some form
• IT data warehouse, business planning and business
process systems led for top business-related
integrations

War Room Metrics, Obstacles and
Success Factors

Key War Room Metrics
• Top five technical metrics:
– Performance/latencies (45%)
– End user experience (40%)
– Security-related KPIs (37%)
– Third-party SLAs (36%)
– Availability (35%)
• Top five business metrics:
– IT team disruption (36%)
– Employee productivity (31%)
– Industry compliance-related metrics, tied with cost-related
external SLAs (with service providers) (27%)
– Service desk OpEx cost savings (26%)

Top War Room Obstacles or Roadblocks
• Security-related issues (34%)
• Inconsistent or inaccurate data, tied with
– data fragmentation/separate views in separate silos (32%)
• Reactive versus proactive insights (31%)
• Tied at 29%
– Lack of automation
– Complexities due to
cloud-related resources
– Cultural and political
issues within IT

You Were Most Likely to Be Successful If You…
• Were more likely to diagnose incidents before they
impacted outages
• Had the executive suite own your war room
• And had direct CIO-level involvement
• Had more workloads in the public cloud
• Were more likely to leverage dependency mapping
• Use advanced IT analytics
• Had an established history of using intelligent bots
• Prioritized a high level of business integrations

A Few Concluding Thoughts

Concluding Thoughts
• The Digital War Room is becoming more not less important in the Digital
Age
• It is also becoming more inclusive—growing in size, and becoming more
aligned with development and DevOps needs
• Incident management still reins as the overarching area of coordination
• The “all virtual” war room isn’t really there yet-both in volumes and in
effectiveness:
– But hybrid combinations of physical and virtual are most
successful
• Having both senior executive presence and an ongoing/formal ‘war
room’ with more well defined processes also argues for success
• IT executives were most bullish about success—non-IT business
stakeholders least bullish.
– Development roles also stood out for ‘war room skepticism’

Concluding Thoughts -2-
• Advanced IT Analytics and SIEM Led as the most
critical war room technologies
– 95% Claim to be using advanced IT analytics (or AI Ops)
– 38% have intelligent bots deployed
• Only 3% are not using any form of dependency
mapping
• Cloud migrations and security led as the most
significant obstacles to toolset effectiveness
• Security issues and data issues led as the biggest
overall roadblocks to war room success

Unifying IT for Digital War Room Performance

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