Whiskey and Wisdom: Justifying AIOps

Whiskey and Wisdom is a monthly executive-only forum where IT Operations leaders can network independently and discuss high-level AI operations and IT Ops strategies with their industry peers.

In our most recent session, the discussion was around justifying AIOps—proving the value the technology brings to the table. Demonstrating ROI on AIOps tools requires its champion at the organization to show a conceptual proof of concept—and there are a number of steps you need to take to get this right. Here are some of my takeaways from BigPanda’s most recent Whiskey and Wisdom forum:

Determine your vision

Proving AIOps ROI starts with putting together a broad vision of what you’re trying to accomplish. What does IT Ops look like at the organization right now—and what are your goals for three or four years into the future? Enterprise-wide buy-in might not happen right away, so starting small with forward-thinking groups that have a problem AIOps platforms can solve—human bandwidth and enterprise growth capability, for instance—can help the idea of AIOps gain traction.

Tie AIOps into your overall strategy

At its core, AIOps is all about being able to ensure IT Operations within an organization are running as smoothly and as efficiently as possible. Proving its value means anchoring it to the strategic imperatives within the business. AIOps needs to be seen in the larger context of everything else that’s happening at the enterprise.

Look at both tangible and intangible aspects

The tangible aspects are measurable when unifying your IT Ops data with analytics. This includes measuring  mean time to respond to mean time to identify to mean time to repair—and how to translate these IT Ops metrics into business impact.

Intangibles include things like customer experience and reduction in downtime. While reduction in downtime to critical business applications is an obvious benefit, some stakeholders may view this as intangible. Turn it into a tangible by talking about how AIOps helps eliminate the cost of downtime—which for some enterprises can equate to savings in the millions.

Key takeaway: The importance of executive observability

There are so many tools that are used only at an operational level yet have so much data that can be used at the executive level, but aren’t extended that far. If 95% of the implementations of a technology are at the operational level, all executives see is the expense—often resulting in a move toward an ineffective open source solution because the value isn’t transparent.

Proving the value of AIOps automation means taking data and actually building executive dashboards that show the direct benefit at an organization-wide level. At the end of the day, the executive needs to look at a dashboard and say: If I have that, I can do my job better.

Join us at Whiskey and Wisdom

Whiskey and Wisdom sessions occur monthly and the topics will always focus on high-level trends in the IT Ops community. This closed forum is invite-only to ensure the conversation remains interactive and derives maximum value. And yes—whiskey will be provided. If you would like to join a future Whiskey and Wisdom event, email us at: events@bigpanda.io