Using IT Process Automation (ITPA) to Out-Innovate Your Competition

Service Providers Must Ensure That Back-End and Front-End Processes and Tools Are More Adaptive, Automated and Human-Centric Than Ever Before

Information and communications networks – supporting everything from VoIP to mobile video, cloud platforms and more – have become far too big and complex for cost-effective management by traditional operational support system (OSS) methods and tools. Each step forward disrupts legacy business models yet also opens new doors to human experience and business exploitation.

As much as these technological advances have required a re-evaluation of business and service methodology, so too do they also demand a re-assessment of current notions of OSS and business support systems (BSS) practices.

The service providers that survive the market transformations currently underway must put their assumptions about service operations through a gauntlet; and, if they are to succeed at out-innovating their competition, they must also ensure that their back-end and front-end processes and tools are more adaptive, automated and human-centric than ever before.

The seemingly intractable tension between increased competition, higher service quality requirements and fixed operational costs acts to constrain innovation and drive margins down for every participant in the market. By making targeted process improvements across network operations and customer care, service providers can achieve significant structural advancements in their cost models and remove current constraints to innovation, namely cash flows.

The means of accomplishing this objective rests within a new software discipline called IT process automation (ITPA). ITPA tools and associated methods hold the promise of enabling a significant, readily-quantifiable, re-investment of firm operational resources back into innovation and other revenue-generating areas.

Here on this blog in the weeks and months ahead we’ll be going into more detail on ITPA tools and how they can help you out-innovate your competition. You’ll learn more about our Resolve social ITPA software, which helps businesses break down traditional organizational and process constraints with an innovative approach to automation. Powered by actionable and dynamic knowledge management capabilities, Resolve has been proven to help organizations realize as much as a 200 percent cost savings within months of deployment.

Ready to dive into ITPA right away? For more details on our latest ITPA offering – the Resolve Event Management Automation solution – please click on this link: http://www.resolve-systems.com/files/pdf/EMA_Datasheet_New.pdf

IT Game Changer: Unleashing Tribal Knowledge in Enterprise IT

A community is a collection of people with common needs and wants. Safety. Food. Happiness. The need to work more efficiently is a driving force behind the human desire to form communities, and experts have found that empowering the connection between efficiency and community represents an opportunity to make meaningful improvements in a corporate context.

But the innate sense of community often gets blurred in a corporation, although the need to work towards common goals and make use of “tribal knowledge” to improve efficiency is no less present. The biggest obstacle to corporate efficiency is the complexity of underlying goals and of the relationships involved in meeting those goals. We have 18^th century business models to thank for this phenomenon–they’ve left their mark and continue to pervade today’s corporate structures.

Even as modern communication tools such as email and micro blogging have made some improvements, the fact remains that cooperation and collaboration are still insufficient to promote a level of corporate efficiency that can make a lasting impact.

The community of IT workers that design, implement and support enterprise communications and computing provides an example of the inefficiencies of today’s organizations. They frequently work within highly-siloed cultures operating through complex hierarchies of specialization. The challenges they face on a daily basis often take precedence over their ability to move the organization forward. As a result, they are less strategic, more reactive and less effective collectively.

What are today’s most successful organizations doing to overcome these IT “community” issues? They’re applying three distinct innovations to “superpower” their IT professionals, and as a result, they’re reaping significant efficiency savings by eliminating much of the manual interactions between people and the systems they support. Those three innovations are SOCIAL, KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (KM) and AUTOMATION.

Our Resolve software embraces all of these innovations, and we believe it represents a significant IT game changer in terms of its capability to make powerful connections between efficiency and community. Resolve is a software platform that is defining an emerging IT management discipline called social IT process automation (ITPA). It drives social ITPA through the use of Wikis, which centralize operational knowledge for easy sharing across the enterprise, while also automating up to 90 percent of IT tasks.

No other ITPA solution on the market brings together the big three – social, KM and automation – like Resolve. We are seeing Resolve customers, from large communication service providers to global financial corporations, achieve efficiency increases of more than 250 percent in a matter of months. You can read more about the game-changing possibilities that you can achieve with Resolve here: www.socialitpa.com

On a side note, the book, “Tribal Leadership,” by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright, served as an inspiration for this post. If you haven’t yet read it, I highly recommend it. Visit the book’s website for more details: http://www.triballeadership.net/book.

RBA: At the Intersection of Innovation and Automation

At this year’s TM Forum/Management World Conference in Dublin, Ireland, I had the privilege of speaking at the annual Innovation Spotlight event, hosted by Stratecast, a division of Frost & Sullivan.


Along with the other panelists, I was asked to address the need for OSS/BSS solutions that meet urgent communication service provider (CSP) requirements for reducing costs, increasing revenue and improving customer satisfaction. This topic hits home with many CSPs as well as other organizations, who, in an era of commoditization and intense competition, face complex challenges.

Innovation in every aspect of business – from partnerships and products, to operations and business service management – is clearly essential today, and the panel set the stage for me to tell attendees how our Resolve Run Book Automation platform is making a difference for CSPs. It is automating routine tasks to save time and costs, while freeing up knowledge workers to explore new avenues of growth and innovation for their companies.

TM Forum was a great experience for our team once again, and it offered an excellent opportunity to spread the word about the power of Resolve.

Incidentally, the Innovation Spotlight panel coincided with the recent selection of generationE for the annual Stratecast “10 to Watch” report, which predicts rising stars in the OSS/BSS sector. You can read more about this report, as well as all of our recent awards, by visiting the generationE website.

CIO.com Article- Don't Ditch the Domain Tools... Apply Platform Automation

I recently published an article on a CIO.com blog site outlining the perils of rip-and-replace mentality for enterprise computing environments.  See my description of the 'trap' and my proposed answers below.

http://advice.cio.com/ckindiger/15365/rip_and_replace_vs_upstream_automation_four_factors_to_consider_for_driving_efficiency_improvements_in_event_man

Article on B/OSS

Would love to get your comments on my new article on B/OSS World magazine.

http://www.billingworld.com/blogs/insider/2010/08/collaboration-combined-with-automation-the-key-to.aspx

A perspective on event management, event correlation, and the service desk.

The answer to most of the pains being experienced by organizations with large historical investments in event management, correlation, and service desk technology is not to 'rip and replace'... it is to focus on upstream AUTOMATION.  I have some clients that are considering ripping out their Network Management and Event Management Systems in favor of open source or commodity-play products, or even switching to one of the other large platform players.  These considerations are driven by a genuine frustration with difficulty in driving additional efficiency improvements from the systems.  Indeed the systems represent a tremendous investments within their environment and with the increased focus on cost savings today, there is an understandable feeling that perhaps the cost of maintaining the platform is prohibitive.

There are several considerations I would counsel a client to make prior to moving in this direction:
1) There is significant innovation occuring above the Event Management layer - Business Process Management, Run Book Automation, etc.  Unless the system is broadly adopted, it will likely not be part of the broader ecosystem of innovation.  Adopting a new Event Management system may reduce maintenance costs in the short term, but it will impede your ability to drive further efficiencies into the process itself.
2) Small software companies / aggressive development teams can often deliver quick integrations that prove difficult to maintain and constrain interoperability in the future
3) Scalability is an ongoing process.  Maintaining pace with growing computing complexities and taking advantage of the latest advances in application architecture require substantial capital investments.  A low cost provider will have difficulty investing sufficient capital to keep up the pace of innovation. 
4) In a mature technology market (like event management) low cost providers have historically either (1) been gobbled up by a larger player or (2) relegated to a niche customer segment where the particular technology market is only marginally relevant to the business, or (3) gone out of business due to being over extended without an operating model that is sustainable.

OSS, BSS, and Cloud Communications

The problems addressed by operations support systems (OSS) technology and process are not in any way diminished by the incorporation or wholesale adoption of cloud computing and cloud communications.  If anything, the rapid adoption of different cloud technology paradigms demands a renewed focus on OPERATIONS.  When the smoke settles, and new cloud driven use cases have been explored and addressed by multiple vendors, both traditional communication service providers (CSPs) and those with new business models, switching costs will be minimum, and operating costs and service experience will be paramount to retaining users (customers).  Operations process automation will take center stage in OSS strategy and will be the central 'make or break' component of a successful business model.


A recent article in CRN Magazine describing a new alliance focused on the communications side of the cloud underlines the importance of both new entrants and traditional CSPs to place operations automation at the core of their strategy.


http://bit.ly/bvjIXK


The rate of decline of traditional telecommunication services continues to accelerate.  CSPs are rapidly converting PSTN subscribers to VoIP, fixed mobile, and in some cases, mobile offerings.  Take a look at the latest TM Forum research papers- the #s are staggering (http://www.tmforum.org/).  The focus of traditional CSPs is now largely  on delivering creative bundled offerings that offer more value at increasingly lower prices.  With the onset of cloud based communications platforms hitting the mainstream, cloud communications and cloud computing will intersect and further accelerate adoption of a broadening array of cloud paradigms.


While cost savings and redundancy are key, they are easy to address in the early evolution of cloud computing and cloud communications- but they become more challenging as more services move to the cloud the various platforms are required to inter operate.  For example, consider a simple case where back office ERP systems are integrated to salesforce.com through cloud based integration components, and salesforce.com is enabled by a cloud based, integrated converged communications platform.  Scale this to millions of "users" across tens of thousands of organizations. 


A renewed focus on operations process automation is required to bring OSS capabilities in line with its importance in the continued evolution of the cloud.