Forrester: Assessing Complexity In IT Operations

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Evolven was one of the companies interviewed for a recent report entitled "Assessing Complexity In IT Operations," by  Jean-Pierre Garbani, VP and Principal Analyst with Forrester Research. 

In this insightful report Garbani focuses his attention on what comprises complexity in IT operations and the main question of how best to address it. 

Complexity is a recurring theme for today's infrastructure and operations (I&O) executives. Applications are proliferating, and the interdependence between applications is multiplying as new functions are integrated or added to existing legacy ones. This makes it increasingly difficult to manage and control the sprawl and delivery of all these business services. Complexity is currently cited as the root cause of all IT operations ills. I&O teams are desperately trying to reduce or abstract it. So where do you start remediating all this complexity?

On Defining Complexity

Before diving into the nature of complexity, Garbani does a good job of putting complexity into perspective. He sets the scope of I&O complexity to  cover a broad area of IT operations, by defining it as the change to the overall environment over time. His clear and useful definition for I&O complexity is: "A period of change in infrastructure and operations during which an organization tries to control a new technological environment using obsolete methods and processes."

What intensifies and even accelerates this complexity is the introduction of new technologies and new business services, disrupting a 'stable' status quo. The approaches that could be relied on before when changes like new features or new releases were just a quarterly event, no longer can keep up with the new reality of shorter and shorter periods of an unaltered environment.

With the goal is to understand impact to performance and then analyze the activities involved to improve the issue, Garbani introduces an assessment of complexity to reach an overall indication of the relative complexity, specifically by measuring results rather than analyzing details. 

Six Key Indicators to Focus on for Assessment of Complexity 

He identifies the following six key indicators to focus on for an assessment of complexity: 

• Overall time management of IT operation resources. "This factor will consider the percentage of time spent by I&O staff in unscheduled or unplanned tasks." 
  
  We have seen the importance of this area, as the pace of changes and releases drastically increases, especially unplanned, unauthorized, or unintended. Productivity drops significantly as I&O deals with events outside the project scope, focusing on maintaining a baseline of stability.
• Release management, application deployment and software deployment or business services. "This includes the configuration of all the components in the service being deployed. This indicator measures the percentage of releases and deployments completed successfully versus the total number of deployments attempted."
  
  Here Garbani has identified a key area to focus on, as releases into production  is highly visible and typically entails stabilization periods and can even cause downtime with a direct impact on revenue and profitability. Furthermore, operations teams are faced with the added challenge of ensuring accurate error-free application releases and with appropriate configurations during promotion and deployment, taking into account configurations that are inherently different between pre-prod and production. Even with the availability of  automated deployment solutions, this still doesn't ensure that environments are properly configured.  Following the deployment, without proper validation,  there is no way to know for certain that the deployment was successful – until a slowdown or incident occurs.
• Configuration management and change management. "This measures the percentage of successful changes versus the total number of authorized changes. A complementary measure considers the percentage of unauthorized changes relative to the number of authorized ones." 
  
  We have seen how as software systems, the development process, and resources become more distributed, this not only contributes to less visibility and but adds to complexity and the configuration management challenge. Introduction of changes into IT infrastructure is today considered to be one of the leading causes of system downtime, with as much as 10% of all changes having to be rolled back due to irreconcilable issues.
• Incident management and problem management. "A typical SLA should be established for incidents and problems of differing severities. The measures look at: 1) the percentage of incidents and problems resolved within the SLA, and 2) the resources that had to be pulled from their normal tasks to resolve the problem."
  
  In this indicator, Garbani emphisizes an important metric to give I&O a measure of complexity. We know how an incident can be brought on by almost any minute mis-configuration or omission of a single configuration parameter, leading to results that have high impact to the organization: reputation damage, dissatisfied customers, financial losses, legal liabilities, and full re-organization. In addition, productivity drops drastically as incident investigation teams are transformed into a group of 'firefighters', running against time to stabilize high-priority crises, and taken away from their primary mission of building and enhancing the infrastructure for business.
• Infrastructure projects such as hardware deployments.
• Batch updates including data stores and backup and recovery.

Areas to Focus On For Remediating Complexity

In the report, he advises on the areas to focus on in order to remediate complexity.  Three areas for complexity remediation are: necessary skills, streamlining processes, and the need to automate the solution for dealing with complex IT environments.

What are the skills needed for the task of dealing with complexity? These actions influence and direct how to react to issues that occur in IT operations.  He writes "For example, incident and problem management requires that after identification of the problem area the issue gets directed to the right group or persons."

The next area of focus is the need to streamline the process. For most organizations, the change management process has been established through the ITIL framework, to provide a proper review of changes before implementation. However this very process, as the pace of change intensifies, is adding to complexity.  He explains, "An overly complex change process that calls for a lengthy chain of review and approval may deter most employees from using it and consequently push the number of unauthorized calls in the name of expediency and effectiveness."

Finally, he cites automating the solution as critical for handling the scope of change management in today's organizations.  Automation offers infrastructure and operations staff a way that can impact IT to be a channel for ensuring that business operations perform at the highest levels. He relates, "Some very complex applications require I&O to set tens of thousands of parameters. The frequency of change is so great that it results in chaotic modifications. Training and change management solutions must then be used, at a level of granularity that provides a control/validation of configuration parameters and the detection of unauthorized changes. Look to use automation in these complex application deployments and changes."

Garbani concludes his analysis emphasizing not only what the IT professionals of today have to contend with, but really what this means for what will happen next. He notes that,  "IT operations managers must remember that today's issues will be multiplied in the near future."

The report is available at http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/assessing_complexity_in_it_operations/ 

About Jean-Pierre (J.P.) Garbani, VP, Principal Analyst Forrester

Jean-Pierre has several decades of experience as an IT technology designer and marketer, as well as a client of IT technology. He has broad experience in designing advanced technology solutions in industrial and commercial applications and bringing them to market. He has written extensively on technology for several business publications. Jean-Pierre is often a featured speaker in vendor-sponsored events and Webinars.

His full bio is available on the Forrester website.