What is ServiceOps?

Service operations (ServiceOps) is a technology-enabled approach that unifies IT operations and IT service (ITSM) teams and facilitates frictionless collaboration for more effective incident management.

ServiceOps combines people, processes, and technology to improve visibility, workflows, and collaboration between otherwise siloed departments.

Organizations of all sizes and industries worldwide have adopted ServiceOps. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recently completed its third annual survey of more than 400 global IT leaders to assess their organizations’ progress toward implementing ServiceOps. Adoption is high: 75% of respondents have an active initiative to streamline the cross-functional working of ITSM and ITOps teams.

The adoption rate is high because ServiceOps directly aligns with IT service’s top improvements and goals. EMA survey respondents say the impacts of ServiceOps on their organizations are almost universally positive, with 20% reporting they are transformative. According to EMA, enterprises that adopt ServiceOps can:

• Address many of IT’s highest priorities, objectives, and challenges. These include improved IT employee experience and productivity; reduced frequency, duration, and impact of outages; improved service; and reduced costs.
• Significantly improve the productivity of service agents and ITOps engineers. Teams can do more with the same resources. Morale improves thanks to a less stressful work environment.
• Enhance the value of existing investments. ServiceOps enhances the outcomes of technology investments, including automation, AI, ML, AIOps, and platforms for cross-functional workflows and unified actions.

When implemented effectively, ServiceOps positively addresses many of IT’s top priorities. According to EMA, 30% of respondents reported improved mean time to repair (MTTR), while 36% reported higher productivity and less wasted time. ServiceOps streamlines processes, enhances collaboration, and reduces costs.

As with any major initiative, implementing ServiceOps has organizational and technical challenges. When ITSM and ITOps teams lack standardized processes, it is extremely difficult to coordinate activities, automate workflows, and effectively unify service and operations.

On the technical side, fragmented data, manual processes, and siloed tools and workflows pose significant challenges. More than 30% of the EMA respondents identified data access and accuracy as the top obstacle to ServiceOps, followed by legacy systems (28%) and technology (27%).

EMA recommends implementing the following to ensure the effectiveness of ServiceOps:

• Workflows to bridge dev, ITOps, and ITSM teams
• Access to real-time contextual data, including discovery and dependency mapping, IT asset management, and change management database (CMDB) data.
• End-to-end visibility into application performance and IT infrastructure
• Organizational changes to facilitate collaboration

Implementing these changes requires improved processes and the right technology.

EMA respondents report that the factors that are most important to unify ITSM and ITOps are:

• Cross-functional processes and workflows (56%)
• Shared and accessible data (53%)
• Organization and management support (51%)
• Shared objectives and metrics (50%)

To deliver the desired outcomes of ServiceOps, ITSM and ITOps teams need shared workflow processes and technology to break down operational and data silos and facilitate cross-functional collaboration. Nearly half of EMA’s respondents identified “a platform for enterprise-wide visibility and action” as the most critical technology to unify service and operations.

Survey respondents also identified AIOps as one of the top three technologies to enable ServiceOps, a substantial gain since 2023. Advanced AIOps can instantaneously correlate monitoring, topology, change, CMDB, and historical data across multiple sources. With AIOps, ITOps and ITSM teams gain end-to-end visibility into incidents and their entire IT infrastructure.

With this unified view, ITOps and ITSM teams can quickly understand what happened and why without juggling multiple monitoring systems. Teams can resolve more incidents faster, eliminate data silos, efficiently collaborate around remediation efforts, and automate manual processes.

AI, ML, and generative AI have significant potential for ServiceOps. EMA’s respondents identified the following GenAI capabilities as most valuable to their organization:

• Real-time identification of business context, dependencies, and impact (46%)
• Identification and engagement of people and resources needed for action (41%)
• Immediate and accurate triage and routing of tickets (40%)
• Summarization of issue, case, and incident (36%)

For ServiceOps to deliver value from AI investments, it’s critical to ensure these tools are fed domain-specific information. As you progressively integrate AI into your ServiceOps practice, making those tools actionable and credible depends on feeding them comprehensive, accurate, and relevant contextual data. AIOps can correlate contextual information from across the IT infrastructure into a unified, full-context view. This empowers AI, ML, and GenAI tools to make accurate recommendations that improve decision-making.

Adopting ServiceOps can improve MTTR, boost productivity, simplify collaboration, and streamline workflows, enabling you to deliver outstanding service quality. EMA’s report, ServiceOps 2024: Automation and (gen)AI-powered IT service and operations, goes in-depth into:

• How to successfully implement ServiceOps
• The practical applications of automation, GenAI, and AI in ServiceOps
• How to overcome organizational and technical obstacles to ServiceOps