The 7 Steps Approach

What is it? 

Investments in digital transformation initiatives have skyrocketed since COVID-19 and we now have "New Normal", and organizations have pivoted to entirely to new business models to support flexibility, efficiency and cost control. Mission-critical services of all kinds are being digitized, like online shopping experiences, remote learning and workforce, medical care through telemedicine or automated supply chain optimization. While 2020 wasn't easy for any organization, those that are thriving have embraced a digital service mindset and NVC-BI have full understanding of the "New Normal".

Note: Digital transformation is a journey, and it doesn’t happen overnight. By aligning digital services, supporting teams and technology to business objectives, you can confidently ensure the end-user experience is prioritized. Here are out 7 step processes:

1. Understand your organization’s cloud strategy. Identify what critical services are moving to the cloud. By understanding the organization’s cloud strategy and what service initiatives are or are in the process of being digitized, your team can identify which stakeholders and parts of the business are ready and open to implement a modern, customer-centric approach to service management.

2. NVC-BI will identify your top critical services that matter most to your organization. Analyze major customer-facing incidents for clues about possible pain points and impacted services. Are there services that executive leadership consistently follows? Identify critical stakeholders in operations, development, security and business who are held accountable for P1 service outages and incidents. Then, identify executive stakeholders who are driving transformation strategy initiatives and their reasons behind this change. Some business reasons for transformation include new market pressures, cost reduction and risk mitigation. From the technical side, modernization of legacy infrastructure or ne technical expertise and workforce demand may drive initiatives.

3. Identify KPIs for one layer of your business. Once NVC-BI have identified the tope services that matter to your business, establish KPIs to measure success and track goals. First start with objectives that your team cares about. IT operations teams can begin monitoring KPIs for a certain type of infrastructure (e.g., database performance). Service delivery and assurance teams can start by monitoring business activity trends and volumes.

4. Establish shared business KPIs across multiple teams. Next, partner with service stakeholders across departments to determine objectives and goals that can be shared across teams. There shared objectives should align to business goals such as revenue generated or customer satisfaction. Now more that ever, technical teams have have incentive to align their initiatives to business objectives. CIO and IT team must demonstrate IT's business value. Development teams are increasingly responsible for protecting business performance as more applications are required to generate revenue. Bring business and tech stakeholders together to define shared KPIs first, then gather the proper metrics to support those KPIs across the various departments. You should have already established your teams' KPIs from step-3

5. Capture business architecture and KPIs across one service. Using the stakeholder intelligence from the previous step, document business and technical KPIs that are related to a single service. Capture the entire business service architecture and map its components to associated business and technical metrics (i.e., the end-to-end business workflow and supported infrastructure). Finally, build dashboards that visualize business and technical KPIs and support root cause analysis for a service degradation. Go beyond basic reporting templates to include KPI definitions and map technology metrics to the KPIs they support. Create a unified data repository from across various systems to collect the metrics for multiple users to view.

6. Establish predictive insights for a service. With the ability to visualize and monitor a service end to end, the next step is to set up and train algorithms to generate predictive intelligence for a service. Start by piloting various advanced algorithms on a service. Don’t implement alerting or response until this has been validated. Then train machine learning algorithms on KPI health. These vary by industry, but examples include mobile payments performance, citizen services and claims processing.

7. Create a center of excellence for data. Expand the monitoring strategy and holistic framework to more teams and advocate the benefits of correlating more data into one place. As more teams adopt this holistic monitoring strategy, buy-in will get easier. One approach to convey the value is for teams to see their data in the new proposed approach. Offer to create a dashboard for them using your dashboard framework and platform. When an issue arises, you can use your intelligence to communicate what went wrong with their systems. Finally, enable automation and orchestration across processes to predict more outages and reduce remediation times. Include accountability mechanisms that use data and analytics to drive efficient workflows and more automated processes