In the application economy, the user experience is emerging as the ultimate barometer of success.

While high performance and instantaneous responsiveness only continue to get more critical, addressing these requirements keeps getting more difficult. Why is the job so tough?

Digital natives are disrupting every industry. In response, market incumbents have to innovate, and fast. This means bringing applications to market faster than before, placing ongoing, intensified pressure on development and operations teams to balance speed with reliability.

Further, the environments that support applications keep growing more dynamic. Workloads shift across virtualized systems. Communications and data constantly run across distributed, hybrid on-premises and cloud environments.

Finally, to deliver compelling, high-value business services, an increasing number of back-end applications and environments, APIs, and supporting services all may need to be tied together. While this creates a richer experience for the end user, it ultimately means many more potential points of failure are introduced.

The compounding service level risks of complexity

The reality is that for business services to perform optimally, a number of different systems need to be running optimally. That’s been true for years now, but the implications have increased dramatically—and so have the challenges.

Historically, service management efforts were comprised of a number of silos, with isolated teams and technologies. Each team would track a specific element, for example, with one team focused on databases, one on mainframes, one on network equipment, one on data center infrastructure like power supplies and so on.

As business service environments evolved, and grew more complex and interrelated, the de facto response has been to add more tools. When a cloud service is introduced, a tool for that specific vendor’s environment is added. Ditto for when a new hypervisor’s installed, a new storage system comes online, and so on.

The problem? Each team can be meeting targets, but what really matters—the performance of the business service—may be compromised.  Each individual component layer may have 99 percent or better availability, but the service running on top of these elements may only be hitting 85.9 percent.

For many business services, this sort of availability doesn’t cut it. Service levels agreements are breached. Mean-time-to-resolution is painfully long, meaning outages go on way too long. Customers get turned off by a bad experience and go to competitors. Employees get frustrated and aren’t as productive as they could be.

What’s more is that service levels aren’t the only way the business is hurt. IT costs are difficult to control because resources continue to be over-provisioned or under-provisioned. IT staff time is wasted in war-room meetings when issues arise. Instead of focusing on strategic initiatives, IT administrators are consumed with lengthy trial-and-error tasks in an effort to pinpoint issues.

Enter the Business Operations Center

While the issues above are problematic on their own, they loom even more significant in the application economy. Today, applications are simply too integral to the business to stay with the status quo.

It is for these reasons that organizations are starting to move from running NOCs to BOCs—business operations centers.

By establishing BOCs, IT organizations can start to break away from their siloed tools and approaches. IT teams can instead establish a standardized infrastructure, one that offers service level views, across data centers, private clouds and remote networks. Further, they can correlate data across domains to establish service delivery models that enable optimized performance and availability.

Having the right service management solution in place is critical to the transformation. To learn more about how CA Service Operations Insight can help, visit ca.com/soi.

This is the first in a series of blog posts on ensuring successful BOC transformations. Stay tuned for more over the coming weeks!

Transforming a NOC to a BOC (Business Operations Center)

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