Building a culture of automation around a culture of knowledge within the network operations center (NOC) makes it possible for organizations to overcome stagnation and achieve game-changing operational excellence. Today’s most advanced social IT process automation (ITPA) solutions are making this possible by infusing dynamic, human-centric communities into network operations.
Network operations and the NOC -- sometimes referred to as Level 1 support -- form the foundation for high-quality service assurance, ensuring that the network itself supports the increasingly complex lattice of services that ride upon it.
Each NOC that a service provider manages tends to be either geographically- or product- focused, and can be staffed by anywhere from six to 15 personnel on a single shift. The business process of the NOC is typically defined across a classical FCAPS (fault management, configuration, accounting, performance and security) process model, centered on fault management.
As NOC organizations have been constructed over the past 15 years, their services can be loosely classified into proactive identification of existing or potential service problems (“diagnostics”), triage of service problems (“triage”) and routing of problems to the appropriate internal or external engineering resources (“remediation”).
But each of these NOC services, once established to a reasonable level of maturity, has tended towards a state of operational stagnation, able to scale upwards with increased revenues, but with little or no economies of scale. The NOC organizations have similarly been able to incorporate new technologies and products to support new market demands, but have been unable to optimize around those new products in a way that translates into improved operational efficiencies.
One of the primary methods used to address these strategic challenges has been to employ lower-cost labor, either through outsourcing arrangements or other forms of labor arbitrage. But labor costs are equalizing throughout the world and business managers are now required to begin looking at making these NOC organizations more adaptive.
Unlike biological systems, where adaptation is hard wired, organizational processes require an overarching discipline to keep from regressing to a state of stagnation. Transforming from a rigid, stagnant operating model to a dynamic, adaptive one first requires NOC organizations, and the engineering teams that they support, to become very good at knowledge sharing. Much investment has been made in knowledge management, but often with limited results. Databases of operational knowledge tend to age too rapidly for a meaningful shelf life: knowledge management processes have been designed with an insufficient appreciation for human behavior to ensure continuous contribution.
Knowledge Is Something to Be Shared – Not Managed
A culture of knowledge sharing, with the associated increase in aggregate operational and technical knowledge, is the first step in becoming more adaptive. Organizations should actively seek out innovative ideas aimed at instilling such a culture of knowledge sharing through the use of collaborative social media technologies – treating knowledge as something to be shared, not managed.
A more knowledgeable, adaptive NOC organization does not necessarily translate into efficiency improvements, though it certainly results in higher-quality service delivery. Additionally, providing that same NOC organization with the processes and tools needed to methodically automate the delivery of its services ensures that the operational processes are optimized while external business conditions change. For example, an arguably large portion of the work done within the NOC consists of viewing inbound alerts or events from network and systems management tools and running various diagnostics to try and isolate the problem. Running the diagnostics and creating or updating tickets to be routed to the appropriate internal or external engineering resource tends to consume much manual effort in a typical NOC. When coupled with the need to support a dizzying array of new equipment and services, time constraints often dictate that a large portion of the diagnostic and triage work gets left to the assigned engineer, moving further up the value chain.
The Ultimate Game Changer: Adding a Culture of Automation into the NOC Mix
Building a culture of automation around a culture of knowledge within the NOC makes it possible for organizations to achieve the ultimate goal: an elastic process model that scales efficiently with the business. And that’s exactly what our Resolve social ITPA software is designed to do. Resolve empowers businesses to break down traditional organizational and process constraints with an innovative approach to automation. Powered by actionable and dynamic social media-based knowledge sharing capabilities, Resolve has been proven to help our customers realize as much as a 200 percent cost savings within months of deployment.
Want to find out more? In our next blog post, we’ll go into further detail on how to integrate automation into the underlying services previously mentioned – diagnostics, triage and remediation, while also providing insight into customer use scenarios to give you an idea of how Resolve and social ITPA can benefit your organization.
