Sometimes you just need a reason to celebrate. If you work in IT a majority of your day can be spent doing things that don’t feel celebratory. It’s these mundane tasks that wear us down day in and day out. But cheer up friend! There are things worth celebrating and ServiceNow loves to remind IT that they are worth their weight in cake.
Celebrate visibility. IT has been struggling to provide a comprehensive view of the entire datacenter real estate that provides the right kind of value. The measurement of value is the reduction of MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution/Repair) and the more nebulous and important ability to prioritize work effort properly. Imagine having a flood of alerts coming in from multiple monitoring tools that watch all of the end points in the datacenter. Easy to imagine because that’s what IT is facing everyday. Now imagine if you could sift through those in a way that allows you to determine where to start based on priorities that are important to you. If you’re the CFO, I want to work on the things that are impacting revenue the most. If I am the CEO, I may want to work on things that are impacting the largest number of my customers. If I am responsible for unix servers, I want to work on the systems that are in production and host my business critical applications. With visibility, you can do that. And because you can prioritize, and because you can now find the needle in the stack of needles (the root cause) you can also reduce the time it takes to get end users back to work. Productive, revenue generating work.
Celebrate zero touch remediation. Why are humans still fixing machines? Machines should fix machines. Leveraging orchestration to automate the process of putting things back to where they belong isn’t simply a dream anymore. With the advances of machine learning, the platforms we use to manage and watch our systems can start to determine what our next action would be given a certain condition. The next step is to move beyond just decision guidance to allowing the systems to step in and proactively make changes and adjustments that prevent outages alltogether. A platform that supports governance and provides the visibility via metrics to the actions the machines are taking is critical to ensuring things remain smooth and that the closed loop feedback cycle continues to teach more, the machines learn more, and the humans innovate more.
Celebrate saying yes. IT frequently gets pegged as the department of NO! It’s hard being the IT team. You have hundreds of steps that are required to provide the resources that your end users are demanding. The world is changing at light speed all around you and most folks are simply trying to keep their head above water. No wonder IT has to say no. They only have a finite capacity. But if that same automation engine can be used to fulfill requests, the humans can get back to driving better efficiency into the organization which in turn can lead to even more opportunities to say YES!
Celebrate having a great job and career. We all start somewhere, and many times in IT is doing repetitive mundane tasks over and over. Unfortunately, some folks never graduate from those roles because they become so critical. Or you did graduate into a new role and spend all of your nights and weekends doing your real work. Your stale, stagnant IT career doesn’t have to be that way. We’ve eliminated outages so you can now have your weekends and nights back. The stress of 48 hour war room calls and the terrible health conditions that align with that are gone. We automated the mundane tasks that provide zero intellectual challenge so that you can spend your time actually learning cool new things in your environment. You work for a team that gets to say yes every single day, so you are no longer associated with the group that no one in the enterprise wants to work with. Sounds amazing, and sounds worth celebrating and time for a slice of cake!
Digital IRL 