by
Saju Sankarankutty
Vice President and Delivery Head, Cloud, Infosys

Digital Future

Poor IT Service Experience Can Disrupt your Digital Plans

We all love what a smart product can do for us. Take Alexa. Think about Watson. Almost every day businesses are finding new opportunities in applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve major challenges in their industry, in developing new, innovative products and services and in solving problems around their operations and other functions. Similarly, buoyed by the promises the technology brings, customers and end users are expecting and demanding more from the systems and the environment around them. As we continue to develop AI enabled IT systems, we need to think about how it will impact service support and delivery. Read our Point of View ‘Achieve ‘digital reality’ with an AI-powered core engine’ on Infosys.com for more information.

What Hurts IT Operations the Most

IT service management gets complex not just because there is a rise in AI powered systems, but because most of the organizations still have a mix of the old and the new infrastructure from multiple providers that often function in silos. Enterprise policies often do not take care of a uniform SLA. And the biggest challenge is that - no one really spends time visualizing how a missed SLA impacts business. The challenges, thus, center around operations, governance and user experience. And AI can play a significant role in addressing these challenges.

What Will Make IT Operations Tick in a Digital World

Hardware typically creates silos, islands of systems that are run by different vendors. A digital world envisions an organization that is well integrated, where the interplay between systems are well defined, clearly visible and run in tandem.

Software can act as the thread that ties together the fragmented hybrid IT infrastructure of an organization for a synchronized functioning of all its operations and data related processes. We can no longer afford to employ experts who specialize in a particular vendor technology or platform. Rather the focus has to be on solving problems around a business function irrespective of the technology domain being used. Making software the brain behind your IT Infrastructure is key to achieving this. It will also help make IT operations and infrastructure more agile, cognitive and automated.

So What Needs to Change

Everything moves in real time in a digital environment. One needs to be fast, needs to have deep visibility into functions, and have the ability to respond timely and accurately to resolve issues as soon as they arise. Automation is key here. Next is the skill to be agile, to re-engineer workloads as per demand and past experience, and lastly to create a great user experience that is meaningful and pleasant.

Organizations need to think over and strategize about:

  • How can they ensure better availability of business services?
  • Can they get real time insights into KPI performance?
  • How can they rely less on human intervention and automate decision making?
  • Can machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and cognitive automation help IT service systems self-learn and improvise based on history of incidents/customer feedback?
  • How to make measurement of business outcomes a regular part of the IT operations reporting?
  • Can we make IT services more cost effective? Is there an option to consider subscription based consumption model for IT Services?

In an attempt to help organizations, answer these questions, Infosys designed an Integrated Service Experience Transformation Framework that provides guidance on how to rewire the IT infrastructure and improve the service experience of users. Read our Point of View ‘Achieve ‘digital reality’ with an AI-powered core engine’ on Infosys.com.