IT Operations Management: A Service Delivery Primer

IT Operations Management: A Service Delivery Primer

Agile Service Delivery Creates Business Value Today, IT has to innovate at an ever- increasing pace to meet accelerating business demands. Rapid service delivery is essential new business services and service upgrades must be rolled out in weeks, not months or years. This delivery pressure is driving the adoption of agile development and continuous integration approaches that include DevOps, Scrum and Kanban initiatives, which are now replacing traditional waterfall methodologies. Public and private clouds have increased the agility and flexibility of IT infrastructure itself, abstracting away the complexity of hardware and software stacks. This fundamental shift makes IT an equal partner in the success or failure of an organization. Rapid service delivery underpins every aspect of business operations, creating customer value, providing competitive differentiation, and unlocking organizational efficiency and creativity. The ability to deliver high- value services quickly and economically is a core competency and a key source of sustainable business advantage. However, short delivery cycles create enormous challenges for IT. Formerly infrequent activities such as release deployment now have to be repeated again and again. Agile development requires close coordination and transparent communications, which are often difficult to achieve without significant organizational change. To streamline service delivery, IT also needs to break down barriers between development and operations to create a unified DevOps engine. To rise to these challenges, IT needs automated, repeatable service delivery mechanisms that span the entire service lifecycle. Without these mechanisms, IT spends precious time reworking deliverables and re- executing manual tasks, rather than creating business value. Existing siloed approaches just do not work disconnected tools and manual processes are too slow and error- prone, and they do not scale.

Challenges Across the Service Delivery Lifecycle Conceptually, the service delivery lifecycle consists of three major areas development, deployment and operations but in reality these are intimately interlinked. IT faces challenges in each area, but must also address end- to- end issues to consistently deliver services successfully. To do this, they need a unified platform that binds service delivery into a cohesive whole one that creates visibility, drives consistent processes, and automates repetitive activities. The Service Delivery Lifecycle There are many cases where a holistic approach is essential. Consider the following examples: Cloning production systems for development and testing Development teams need a real- world baseline to develop and test releases. Otherwise, they risk poor quality, significant service outages and business disruption. However, manually cloning production systems is time- consuming, and it is easy to make mistakes particularly when a separate team has manually deployed the production system. To avoid issues, deployment and cloning processes must mirror each other and be repeatable which requires automation. Release handover When development releases to deployment, the handover must be seamless and predictable. Otherwise, the configuration that is deployed may not match the one that was tested. Manual processes, undocumented scripts, and poor communications all increase the risk of handover failure and also create significant compliance issues. Predictable, automated release processes are crucial particularly when rapid product evolution has given rise to numerous variants.

Post- release feedback into development Once a release is deployed, operations teams inevitably make changes to address problems and optimize performance. These have to be fed back into future release cycles for both planning and continuity purposes. Development teams need visibility of defects and enhancement requests so that they can add these to the product backlog this requires a formal communication process from operations to development. To prioritize development items, product owners need the ability to analyze production services for costs, utilization, and incident hotspots. Workarounds applied to the production system also need to be propagated forward into future releases otherwise, issues will reappear. There are many additional cases where end- to- end visibility and automation is needed. Examples include business controls, auditing, patch deployment, troubleshooting and others. Without a unified service delivery platform, these all create significant business exposure. At the same time, each individual service delivery area presents its own challenges: Development teams lack the shared visibility and control that is essential for agile development. They have no single system of record for planning, design, build, test and release processes, and lose track of rapidly evolving requirements as a result. This leads to omissions and mistakes and ultimately to unnecessary rework and delivery delays. Internal communications is also a major issue, particularly between onshore development and offshore QA teams. Deployment teams have no consistent way to provision IT infrastructure and business services. They rely on disconnected tools to install software and configure systems leading to long deployment times and extended service outages. Mergers and acquisitions also complicate the process, with disparate technologies and architectures magnifying effort and increasing risk. Even when IT infrastructure is relatively homogeneous, IT is often locked into a specific hosting provider because their business services are not standardized and portable. Operations teams must deal with the aftermath of poor releases, firefighting issues that directly affect customers and cost millions of dollars. Releases are thrown over the wall without any clear indication of what has changed making it difficult to resolve new problems, let alone plan proactively for new releases. Because of this, operations is often reduced to reporting issues back to development, rather than providing effective second- line support. Left unchecked, these issues prevent rapid and responsive service delivery. Other business functions soon lose faith and launch shadow IT initiatives that bypass IT. As a result, IT loses control, faces serious governance and security issues and ultimately struggles to fulfill its mission. Something needs to change

ServiceNow Unifies and Automates Service Delivery With ServiceNow, IT delivers high- quality services rapidly and predictably. ServiceNow combines the benefits of release management, configuration automation and service analytics into a single system of record that unifies processes, automates delivery tasks, and breaks down barriers between delivery teams. Manual activities and siloed systems are replaced by consistent workflows that are repeatable, scalable, compliance and secure. As a result, development, deployment and operations are melded into an efficient, responsive team that scales to meet the delivery demands that IT organizations face today. Orchestration and Cloud Provisioning ServiceNow fully automates service deployment, orchestrating infrastructure and application provisioning including in public and private clouds. Using ServiceNow, IT can create a standard set of infrastructure services, and then combine these reusable building blocks to deploy and upgrade complex multi- system business services. ServiceNow has a drag- and- drop workflow designer that makes this process intuitive and efficient. It also allows manual activities to be incorporated directly into these provisioning processes, so that items such as approvals and physical infrastructure deployment can be included when required. Release Management ServiceNow provides single system of record that drives and tracks all development processes and deliverables. With ServiceNow, development teams plan, build, test and release business services more efficiently and accurately. Its broad range of release management capabilities include specific support for agile methodologies such as Scrum, delivering rich process support and comprehensive data models. ServiceNow also provides extensive support for waterfall and other traditional approaches, coordinating activities and improving communications in distributed SDLC environments. IT organizations accelerate execution and improve release quality without significant process changes, while creating a clear path forward to agile development and continuous integration. Service Analytics ServiceNow includes a rich set of analytical capabilities that allow IT to understand both cost and operational performance, so that they optimize business services and drive continuous improvement.

Orchestration and Cloud Provisioning IT needs standardized infrastructure building blocks when developing and delivering business services. These provide key resources for development, and allow the deployment process to be broken down into consistent, repeatable steps. For instance, IT may host many business services within a public cloud environment such as Amazon EC2. Although the overall business service is different in each case, the task of creating Amazon EC2 instances and installing software stacks is the same across many services. Standardized infrastructure services With ServiceNow, IT creates standardized services that automate infrastructure provisioning, making it efficient and repeatable. ServiceNow orchestrates all of the provisioning steps, interfacing directly with the IT infrastructure. It can create single components such as VMs or can provision an entire stack in one step. End- users access these infrastructure services through ServiceNow s intuitive service catalog. This abstracts away the underlying complexity of service provisioning users simply select the service that they want to provision. They then enter further service parameters into a provisioning template and submit the provisioning request. ServiceNow then automatically orchestrates the entire end- to- end provisioning process. Service Catalog An example of this is shown on the right. In this case, the service catalog contains a set of Amazon EC2- based services. The user selects one of these services a single- instance CloudFormation LAMP stack. They then fill in the service template, providing both Service Template service- specific information such as type of instance, subnet IDs and required storage along with business information such as the cost center and project for the stack. ServiceNow then orchestrates the provisioning workflow and notifies the user whether or not the resource was successfully created. Orchestration Workflow ServiceNow automates the entire infrastructure lifecycle. Users can create new infrastructure services, start and stop services, take snapshots for cloning, and extend leases. Infrastructure services are also automatically mapped into the ServiceNow CMDB, ensuring that they are accurately documented. ServiceNow includes built- in orchestration capabilities for a wide range of infrastructure types, including Amazon AWS, VMware, Active Directory and Exchange. It is also easily extensible it interfaces with any system that provides Web services, and also supports Puppet, Chef, PowerShell, JavaScript probes and other mechanisms. ServiceNow includes service analytics dashboards that give individuals and teams precise, easily- understood information about their Amazon AWS infrastructure. They can see all of their active resources, along with billing and usage information broken down by account, cost center, project and application.

Multi- System Service Deployment ServiceNow also orchestrates deployment of complex business services that span multiple systems. This is done by creating end- to- end workflows that use standardized infrastructure services as building blocks. Individual infrastructure services form sub flows within the overall business service workflow providing a structured, component- based approach to business service deployment. Examples of these end- to- end workflows include deploying a new release, patching a production system, cloning a production system to create a development baseline, or any other typical service delivery task. ServiceNow s drag- and- drop workflow designer provides an efficient and intuitive way to build these workflows. The workflow engine supports both parallel and sequential execution, accelerating the provisioning process while ensuring that dependencies are respected. Workflows can also include manual steps such as physical infrastructure deployment activities or approvals. All workflows are version controlled and explicitly published, providing strong governance while enabling continuous improvement. The figure above shows a simple example of a deployment workflow. Here, a SQL server is set up with four application nodes and a load balancer. A single subflow runs first to provision the database, and then parallel subflows are used to provision the application nodes. Finally, parallel flows are used to link the application nodes to the load balancer. By using ServiceNow as a single system of record for service deployment, IT recognizes many benefits: Deployment effort is vastly reduced due to extensive process automation. Processes are standardized and repeatable, enhancing deployment quality and governance. Processes can span heterogeneous environments simply by including the right infrastructure services. Details of hosting environments are abstracted away, eliminating service provider lock- in. These same end- to- end workflow mechanisms can also be leveraged beyond service delivery to streamline a broad range of business processes. For example, ServiceNow clients have used the same approach to handle employee onboarding, orchestrating all of the activities needed to provide a

complete employee environment including updating HR systems, creating Active Directory entries, setting up email accounts, creating SSL tokens, and even managing facilities requests. Release Management Today, ServiceNow provides a rich set of release management capabilities that automate and streamline processes across the development cycle. In future releases, ServiceNow plans to integrate these capabilities tightly into its service delivery solution, creating a unified end- to- end DevOps framework that spans development, deployment and operations. These release management capabilities allow IT to define software releases and to establish standardized task workflows. ServiceNow supports both waterfall and agile development processes, providing targeted functionality for both Scrum and traditional SDLC methodologies. Where commonalities exist between waterfall and agile processes such as definition of product hierarchies ServiceNow provides a common data and process framework, simplifying migration from waterfall to agile methodologies and allowing both to exist side- by- side. With ServiceNow, development teams can structure the entire content of releases, capturing both work phases and work items. For instance, when using Scrum, releases are broken down into individual sprints, with stories and epics attached to each sprint. An example of this is shown on the right. Other work items can also be added to the sprint, including defects, documentation tasks and testing tasks. Similarly, with waterfall methodologies, releases are decomposed into individual phases, with features including enhancements, defects and documentation assigned and corresponding tasks identified. As well as modeling releases, ServiceNow also provides a comprehensive process model for agile development. This includes management of items such as backlogs, along with automatic allocation of specific tasks and stories to individual team members. ServiceNow provides detailed tracking of development and test activities such as progress boards for tracking sprint backlogs along with value- added reporting capabilities including velocity and burn- down charts.

Conclusion Today, IT organizations face escalating business demands for innovative business services. This is driving them to adopt agile software delivery methodologies, and to embrace public and private cloud infrastructures. This vastly increases the importance of IT within the organization, providing opportunities to create significant business value. However, this shift to agile delivery has created significant challenges. To respond, IT organizations must ensure complete visibility and control, break down communication barriers, and automate time- consuming, error- prone delivery processes. Disconnected tools and undocumented processes are no longer viable a holistic, integrated approach is needed that addresses the entire software delivery lifecycle. ServiceNow delivers the automated, unified platform that IT organizations need to accelerate service delivery and improve service quality. By enabling agile development, automating service deployment, and providing deep insights into the business performance of services, ServiceNow lets IT transition from siloed development, deployment and operational teams to a unified end- to- end service delivery model that accelerates innovation and enhances service quality.