The document provides an overview of digital operations from Andrew Bessa, a digital engineering manager. It defines digital operations as the people and processes associated with delivering and supporting internal and external digital applications. It discusses key components of digital operations including cloud services, monitoring, change management, security, and DevOps support. It also outlines skills effective teams adopt such as subject matter expertise, structuring work, and increasing developer velocity. Finally, it addresses digital transformation and planning for emerging technologies.

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Andrew Bessa
andrewbessa@gmail.com
andrew_bessa@bradycorp.com

2. Digital Operations
Service Design
May 17, 2018

3. 3
About Andrew Bessa
Highly technical (but charismatic) IT
Manager with +12 years of full-stack
web development, operations, and
digital marketing experience across
multiple industries including banking
and manufacturing.
Brady Corporation
Digital Engineering Manager
& IT Services System
Manager (3 years)
BMO Harris Bank
Senior Web Developer
(3½ years)
Digital Operations Service Design / About Andrew Bessa

4. 4Digital Operations Service Design / About Brady

5. 5Digital Operations Service Design / Brady Digital Footprint

6. 6
What is Digital Operations?
Digital Operations Service Design / What is Digital Operations?
● “Digital” is vague and ambiguous
● Industries will define “digital” differently
● Successful organizations will consistently redefine
“digital”

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What is Digital Operations?
Digital Operations Service Design / What is Digital Operations?
● “Digital” is vague and ambiguous
● Industries will define “digital” differently
● Successful organizations will consistently redefine
“digital”
“The people and management processes associated with
delivering and supporting both internal and external
digital applications, systems, and services with an
emphasis on quality, risk reduction, and cost
effectiveness.”

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Key Focal Points
Digital Operations Service Design / Key Focal Points
● Digital Operation components and service catalog
● Skills adopted by effective teams
● Increasing development team velocity
● Digital transformation and planning for the future

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Digital Operation
components and
service catalog

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Service components
Service components will drive your service strategy.
• Cloud services provisioning and expertise
• Monitoring and analytics
• Change and risk management
• Incident triage and problem root cause analysis
• Security and compliance
• DevOps support
Digital Operations Service Design / Digital Operation components and service catalog

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Cloud services provisioning and expertise
“Cloud is about how you do computing, not where you do computing.”
~ Paul Maritz
•Simplify requirements gathering
•Build an intuitive self-service portal
•Automate service provisioning
•Build POCs as “production ready”
•TAG! TAG! TAG! Tag and
categorize all assets!
Digital Operations Service Design / Digital Operation components and service catalog

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Monitoring and analytics
“Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their
gut. They will be either lucky or wrong.”
~ Suhail Doshi, CEO
•Data always tells a story
•Build dashboards consumable by all stakeholders
•Measure with real-user monitoring (passive)
•Test with synthetic monitoring (proactive)
•Alert and debug with system monitoring (availability)
•Leverage “machine learning” for
trend reporting and
predictive alerting
Digital Operations Service Design / Digital Operation components and service catalog

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Change and risk management
“If you want to make enemies, try to change something.”
~ Woodrow Wilson
•Focus more on impact (who) versus activity (what)
•Keep bureaucracy to a minimum
•Empower AGILE... don’t block it
•Blend change and project management processes
•Adapt change processes to continuous improvement
strategic principles
Digital Operations Service Design / Digital Operation components and service catalog

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Incident triage and problem root cause analysis
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that
created them.”
~ Albert Einstein
Digital Operations Service Design / Digital Operation components and service catalog
•Know the difference between “incident” and “problem”
•Separate “incident” and “problem” processes
•Thoroughly document escalation processes
•Consider “subscription” based notifications
•Avoid processes with “reply-all” email conversing
•Keywords like (“Band-Aid”, “temporary fix”,
“It is what it is”) may mean you
have a “problem”

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Security and compliance
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
~ Warren Buffett
Digital Operations Service Design / Digital Operation components and service catalog
•Security is everyone’s responsibility
•Educate (don’t scare) business stakeholders
•Patch early, patch often
•Incorporate security updates into sprints
•Translate CVE/CVSS to a simplified risk score
•Reduce risk with “compensating controls”

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DevOps support
“Currently, DevOps is more like a philosophical movement, not yet a
precise collection of practices, descriptive or prescriptive.”
~ Gene Kim
Digital Operations Service Design / Digital Operation components and service catalog
•Support rapid continuous deployments
•Understand and support unit testing
•Automate testing and deployment processes
•Take a blue/green environment approach
•Consider the asset life-cycles in your
deployment methodology

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Skills adopted by
effective teams

18. Be subject matter experts
“...top performing businesses are embracing SMEs as the new rainmakers.”
~ Ian Altman
•Strive for operational self-reliance
•Know the cloud service “menus” (AWS, Azure, etc…)
•3 types of monitoring (real-user, synthetic, and system)
•Understand web application architectures
•Understand web application communications
• REST and SOAP methodologies
• Internet protocol suite and terminology
• Network performance waterfall
Digital Operations Service Design / Skills adopted by effective teams 18

19. Incubate subject matter experts
"Diligence is the mother of good luck."
~ Benjamin Franklin
•Great SMEs love to solve problems
•Reduce cynicism by empowering engineers
•Micromanage processes… not people
•Embrace specialized expertise (“I”)
•Encourage breadth of knowledge (“T”)
•Endorse cross-functional training (“M”)
Digital Operations Service Design / Skills adopted by effective teams 19

20. 2020
DepthofKnowledge
Breadth of Knowledge
Digital Operations Service Design / Skills adopted by effective teams
Specialist
Generalist
Specialist
Generalist
Specialist
Specialist
Specialist

21. Structure the unstructured work
Stop managing work through email and spreadsheets!
• Increases visibility
• Improves communication
• Enforces documentation
• Reduces risk
• Drives strategy with real data
• Invest in an ITSM tool
Digital Operations Service Design / Skills adopted by effective teams 21

22. Know your numbers
“...you’ve got to know the numbers—or I will eviscerate you.”
~ Kevin O’Leary
•What did it cost to run operations today?
•What will it cost to run operations tomorrow?
•Keep a detailed inventory
•Keep costs transparent and reportable
•Tag cloud assets
•Require inventory and cost transparency
from your vendors
Digital Operations Service Design / Skills adopted by effective teams 22

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Increasing
development
team velocity

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Increasing development team velocity
Happy developers are productive developers.
• Streamline systems and tool access
• Escalate incidents at the right time
• Avoid “anti-patterns” and set up developers to succeed
• Support their desire to learn new things
• Reduce bureaucracy and focus on building things
• Consolidate or update legacy systems
• Include them in the “right kind” of
problem solving
Digital Operations Service Design / Increasing development team velocity

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Digital transformation
and planning for
the future

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Digital transformation and planning for the future
“By far, the greatest danger of artificial intelligence is that people conclude
too early that they understand it.”
~ Eliezer Yudkowsky
Digital Operations Service Design / Digital evolution and planning for the future
•Focus on high data quality
•IoT and machine learning is only the beginning
•From cloud computing to edge computing
•Blockchain is not just for cryptocurrencies
•Failure as a service… antifragile

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References and Resources
Digital Operations Service Design / References and Resources
➢ Altman, I. (2017, January 5). The Most Valuable Subject Matter Experts Do This. Retrieved from
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ianaltman/2017/01/05/the-most-valuable-subject-matter-experts-do-this/#615cb9063f61
➢ Alsher, P. (2018, March 29). 5 Implications for Change Management in an Agile World. Retrieved from https://www.imaworldwide.com/blog/5-
implications-for-change-management-in-an-agile-world
➢ Anderson, N. (2017, September 5). A Smarter Approach to Digital Operations. Retreived from http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/a-smarter-
approach-to-digital-operations.aspx
➢ Andrus, K. (2015, August 27). Breaking Bad at Netflix: Building Failure as a Service. Retrieved from https://www.infoq.com/presentations/failure-as-a-
service-netflix
➢ Bernstein, D. (2018). How to Increase Velocity. Retrieved from https://www.agilealliance.org/how-to-increase-velocity/
➢ Bixby, J. (2010, July 9). Waterfalls 101: How to understand your website’s performance via waterfall chart. Retrieved from
http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2010/07/09/waterfalls-101/
➢ Boynton, A. (2011, October 18). Are You an "I" or a "T"?. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/andyboynton/2011/10/18/are-you-an-i-or-a-
t/#55b253fc6e88
➢ DIGITAL OPERATIONS FOR THE DIGITAL BUSINESS: TECHNOLOGY FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE (n.d.) In accenture. Retrieved from
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-digital-operations-management
➢ England, R. (2012, August 6). How ITIL gets Incident vs Problem wrong. Retrieved from http://www.itskeptic.org/content/how-itil-gets-incident-vs-
problem-wrong
➢ Hertvik, J. (2017, April 24). ITSM Frameworks: Which Are Most Popular?. Retrieved from https://www.bmc.com/blogs/itsm-frameworks-popular/
➢ Information technology operations. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology_operations
➢ Newman, D. (2017, September 26). Top 10 Trends For Digital Transformation In 2018. Retrieved from
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2017/09/26/top-10-trends-for-digital-transformation-in-2018/#4535645293ab
➢ SOAP vs. REST: The Differences and Benefits Between the Two Widely-Used Web Service Communication Protocols (2017, March 14). In Stackify.
Retrieved from https://stackify.com/soap-vs-rest/
➢ T-shaped skills. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills
➢ Walling, R. (n.d.). Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money. Retrieved from https://www.softwarebyrob.com/2006/10/31/nine-things-developers-
want-more-than-money/

28. Thank you.