ServiceOps: More than the sum ofservice and operations
management
An Intellyx Whitepaper for BMC
by Jason English, Partner and Principal Analyst
August 2023

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ServiceOps is a movement that aligns people, processes and technology
around the shared objectives of service management and IT operations
management.
But wait, do we really need another “AnythingOps” term anyway?
Since the advent of the DevOps movement about a dozen years ago, developers andoperators who were real DevOps devotees tried in vain to prevent the commercializationof the term by pundits, product vendors and employers. Now it’s too late, and we have
DevOps tools, DevOps platforms, DevOps managers and teams, and so on.
DevOps started out with the intention of building a movement, rather than a set oftechnology products. DevOps created a shared culture that encouraged faster and better
quality software releases, by combining relentless optimization, automation andfeedback cycles for development and operations teams, with a softer side ofcollaboration and empathy toward achieving common goals.
Of course, over time, certain solutions like Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery(CI/CD) and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and some Agile naturally became relevant to theDevOps movement and became part of the practice.
Thanks to the success of DevOps as a market, enterprises have been graduallysubmersed into even more “-Ops-suffixed” tech marketing terminology to include othercapabilities and tools. So now you have DevSecOps, TestOps, NetOps, FinOps, et.al, ad
infinitum.
An almost satirical concept called noOps even survived for a few months as a contrariananswer to so many buzzword-ops, the idea being that extensive automation could
somehow replace humans in the IT Ops loop.

©2023 Intellyx LLC. www.intellyx.com

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ServiceOps meets a challenging moment
Now, it’s time for ServiceOps to have its day in the sun.
In 2022, ServiceOps entered the Gartner Hype Cycle for ITSM as “Service Operations” – ata point way, way over to the left, where unproven concepts appear on the enterprise
event horizon. Then, in the latest Gartner Hype Cycle for ITSM, 2023, it progressed further
up the Innovation Trigger wave. We’re going somewhere.

There’s something very different about
ServiceOps that makes it a movement witha better chance at sustainability – andmore than just another *-Ops buzzword.
ServiceOps offers an overdue solution to avery costly problem.

Like DevOps, ServiceOps is a movement that brings together two groups that were once
siloed, so they can work together to achieve more than the sum of their teams. Unlike
DevOps, it would also bring together two different suites of technologies, so teams cancollaborate beyond the siloed platforms they currently have in place.
ServiceOps is really all about serving customers, whether their issues come in directly as
service requests or trouble tickets in an ITSM system, or as production-level incidents
that are reported via monitoring and alerts for resolution in IT operations systems. Bothare equally as important in contextualizing real customer problems.

©2023 Intellyx LLC. www.intellyx.com

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No matter how the business inherits customer problems, it always seems to take toolong to resolve them. It’s a malaise that’s easy to spot behind the scenes of any scaled
enterprise:•

There are too many critical requests for the help desk to respond to.

•

Turnover rates are high in customer and operations support teams.

•

There’s never enough SREs to directly follow up on each incident, much less bring
the right teams together to solve them.

•Developers spend about half of their time finding and fixing reported bugs.

•Security issues and vulnerabilities appearing in production are hard to track to thechanges that created them, and disaster recovery plans are ill-prepared.

•IT executives regularly call all-hands firefighting teams to resolve software issues
with uncertain origins.

Unsurprisingly, all of the above challenges lead to flagging employee morale and a poor
digital experience that can sink the business.

©2023 Intellyx LLC. www.intellyx.com

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ServiceOps begins with data
With so many different sources of data, and billions of data points potentially feeding
multiple platforms and tools that contribute to the detection and resolution of eachcustomer experience issue, data is the best first place to start with ServiceOps.
In an ideal world, all of this data would be formatted and defined with compatible
standards and a common ontology – but in reality, few enterprises with establishedapplication portfolios are in such a position.
Here’s some ways companies are getting a grip on data for ServiceOps:•Respect data gravity. Successfully informing a ServiceOps practice requires both
historical and real-time data – which can often encompass multi-petabyte
volumes and millions of streaming events an hour.
There’s no reason to create an up-front big-bang data migration or dataprocessing constraint on getting productive data into the system, when AI Ops
and data query workloads can instead normalize and filter data closer to eachsource, with less cost and project risk.

•Enhance metadata to meet customer and employee objectives. What
information does the combined ServiceOps practice need to better meet
requests? After looking for common data and definitions across multiple IT Ops
and service management silos, additional metadata is mapped to customer oremployee issues so they can be filtered by region, business unit, product or othercriteria.

•Ingest telemetry data into a common cloud platform to inform service levelindicators (SLIs) specific to the goals of ServiceOps. Since most companies havealready invested in a wide variety of observability, SecOps and change
management applications monitoring some part of their estates, additional filters
to increase relevance and reduce redundancy across logs and metrics can help.
For instance, BMC has an integrated data lake designed for ServiceOps thatingests observability data from third-party systems such as DataDog, Dynatrace
and AppDynamics for cross-environment analytics.

©2023 Intellyx LLC. www.intellyx.com

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Prioritize additional improvements. Once service and production telemetry are
in place on the most critical services, teams can repeat this data enablement
process to expand visibility across more of the application estate based on
anticipated value and efficiency improvements.

It would be outside of the scope of this paper to dig into specifics of whether one datalake, warehouse, streaming service or data integration and orchestration layer is better
than another. That’s an argument for integration architects to sort out.
Most companies have already invested heavily in data infrastructure and management
tools that have been customized for their needs, and don’t intend to replace them in apiecemeal fashion. To avoid the risk of stalling a ServiceOps transformation initiative,prioritize decisions about putting the most relevant ServiceOps data in front ofprofessionals, rather than starting with major platform replacement decisions.

©2023 Intellyx LLC. www.intellyx.com

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The ServiceOps engine: Bringing it all together
If your enterprise’s IT estate is an international airliner, then it is constantly navigating
through changing conditions using software, while looking ahead using an array ofsensors and telemetry data, as well as communication between expert teams in the airand on the ground, to provide a successful customer experience and bring passengers toarrival.
To take this metaphor further, think of ServiceOps as a dual-intake engine, taking in datafrom service management and IT Ops management platforms essential to powering eachflight, supplying the visibility, collaboration and automation needed to keep the businessaloft.
I tried to encapsulate this concept of a dual-intake engine in this infographic:

Figure 1. The ServiceOps Dual-Intake Engine. There are several platforms and existing technologies
that exist underneath the Service Management or ITSM side of the enterprise, and IT Opsmanagement. These two once-siloed technology stacks can be unified by combining data
intelligently, and sharing common ServiceOps telemetry, analytics, collaborative goals andautomation.

©2023 Intellyx LLC. www.intellyx.com

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Transformative expectations of a ServiceOps solution
Flexibility is key. Every company is structured differently, and the people working withineach department have very different responsibilities and needs. All stakeholders in acustomer outcome participate in a ServiceOps workflow, so the technology stackshouldn’t force a rigidly designed data schema or process onto different IT groups orlines of business.
Measure by business SLOs, not tickets. Service level objectives (or SLOs) are better at
incentivizing improvement than the penalties of failing SLAs (or service levelagreements). The best performing ServiceOps companies will measure what matters,
instead of just measuring MTTR (mean time to resolution).
In some cases, more incidents can be a positive measure of ServiceOps, as it indicates
better awareness of the customer experience, and likely forward progress on service
improvements as incidents are found and resolved earlier. Linking service reliability andperformance to business goals allows all employees and partners to know which SLOs
they are responsible for, and the impact they are making with each new feature deliveredor customer issue resolved.
Collaboration and integration. A key goal of ServiceOps is to reduce the complexityand variability of the intake of new service requests and incident reports. Manual
ticketing and incident reporting create too many improperly prioritized critical issues,
and automated alerts can generate too many duplicate and irrelevant requests.
With so many incoming sources of alerts and reported events, a shared ServiceOps
environment would allow system operators, customer service groups, softwaredevelopment teams and executive management to finally get their arms around the risks
and rewards of constant change in the environment whether driven by internal processes
or external forces.
Shared automation and governance. This is where analysis and discussion aretranslated into action. However the ServiceOps team is organized, it should use theshared platform as a fulcrum for setting policies to govern the organization’s response todisparate telemetry and alert sources – and what mix of automation and human attention
should be applied.
For instance a shared platform like BMC Helix for ServiceOps can log incoming eventsand inspect changes, and trigger an automated AIOps triage policy, which may either©2023 Intellyx LLC. www.intellyx.com

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start an automated runbook to resolve a known issue, or kick off an alert process toassemble a tiger team of human experts on a call with all the relevant data ready for
analysis and resolution.

ServiceOps results at work
What does ServiceOps success look like? Results may not seem evident until we lookback on the collective impact of several improvements at once on the overall
performance of the organization. But customers and employees can experience positive
results right away.
Mphasis Limited, an Indian multinational consultancy and IT service provider, had avisibility gap impacting how they managed customer data on its infrastructure. Their
monitoring tools could not correlate high levels of event noise, making identifying andsolving actual problems tricky. Teams were manually entering trouble tickets into
Mphasis’ service management tool, wasting more time and effort.
To gain observability and better integrate with service management, Mphasis brought inBMC Helix Operations Management to improve MTTR, reduce SLA breaches to minimal,and get the required bi-directional integration with its service management system. After
deployment, the company realized a 50% reduction in event noise, lowered MTTR by
50%, and reduced time spent on manual incident management by 80%, while reducing
overall cost thanks to improved monitoring capabilities.
International infrastructure group Balfour Beatty has nearly 25,000 employees to equip,
and a host of partners and suppliers working on multi-billion-dollar internationallandmark and infrastructure development projects. The firm was in the process ofmigrating its applications and data to cloud infrastructure when the Covid pandemic hit,
accelerating the need for project collaboration among now-remote IT and management
staff, and construction and service teams in the field.
To better service global customers despite this changing environment, the company
moved off of its manual and phone-based collaboration processes, and away from therigid processes of ITSM platforms to develop new digital services and manage thecustom IT resources needed by a highly distributed workforce.
Balfour Beatty selected the BMC Helix suite to provide an end-to-end service
management solution that takes new digital customer service capabilities to employees
anywhere – on phones, tablets and laptops in the home office or the field. The company©2023 Intellyx LLC. www.intellyx.com

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has already equipped 85% of its workforce with this new IT application kit, resulting in a
61% reduction in incident resolution time, while doubling the number of year-over-year
automated ticket resolutions.

©2023 Intellyx LLC. www.intellyx.com

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The Intellyx Take
Organizations The DevOps movement was revolutionary when it came out, because forthe first time it put our commitments to each other, and our empathy for fellow teammembers, on even footing with the need to deliver software releases that meet the needsof customers.
Once innovative new features are flying out the door with automation, we find ourselvesin a continual post-release state of supporting a fast-changing digital business, as well as
the employees responsible for supporting customers that interact with that business.
The long tail of post-release support and service – or Day 2 – is every day, as we seek tomake our application estate deliver positive outcomes for all constituents.
Unlike many other -Ops-suffixed buzzwords, ServiceOps feels like a natural evolution ofDevOps because it establishes a common ground for better serving customers, while
meeting the needs of people, processes and technology, in that order, as it always has
been.

©2023 Intellyx LLC. www.intellyx.com

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About the Author
Jason “JE” English (@bluefug) is a Partner & Principal Analyst
at Intellyx, a boutique analyst firm covering digitaltransformation. His writing is focused on how agile
collaboration between customers, partners and employees
can accelerate innovation.
In addition to several leadership roles in supply chain,interactive, gaming and cloud computing companies, Jason
led marketing efforts for the development, testing andvirtualization software company ITKO, from its bootstrap startup days, through a
successful acquisition by CA in 2011. JE co-authored the book Service Virtualization:
Reality is Overrated to capture the then-novel practice of test environment simulation for
Agile development.

About BMC
BMC works with 86% of the Forbes Global 50 and customers and partners around theworld to create their future. With our history of innovation, industry-leading automation,operations, and service management solutions, combined with unmatched flexibility, we
help organizations free up time and space to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprisethat conquers the opportunities ahead.

©2023 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx is editorially responsible for the content of this whitepaper. No AI bots were used
to write this content. At the time of writing, BMC is an Intellyx customer. Image sources: Jason English,Intellyx.

©2023 Intellyx LLC. www.intellyx.com