Automated IT Managed Services?

With more emphasis today on productivity, reducing headcount and reducing excessive spending the spotlight is starting to shine on how organisations manage and support their IT environments.

The Old School Outsourcing of the 1990's

Commercial pressure has always existed to lower costs whilst maintaining or improving customer or user service. For larger organisations, not only was outsourcing deemed necessary to compete in their market space, those that did not embrace signing over all of their IT to the big IT outsourcing consultancies risked falling behind and becoming uncompetitive as 'in-house' operational costs rose.

However, all was not as wonderful as it should have been in the rose garden of Outsourcing and as with actually growing roses, a lot of manure needs to be thrown around for some roses to thrive.

Whilst outsourcers front-loaded contract costs and pressured clients to sign multi-year, data centre management and resourcing agreements clients were also locked into high-penalty get-out clauses and payback terms.

To leverage even more value and reduce costs further, offshoring became in-vogue during the late '90s and early 2000's as whole delivery, development and support functions were offshored to the far east to capitalise on cheaper labour and operational costs. This led (at a great cost) to the rise of 'follow the sun models' where services could operate 24x7 with warm-bodied people attentively responding to systems alerts and issues when the host clients and customers were all asleep.

Whilst benefits were realised during the outsourcing 'hay-day' costs rose and current wage inflation in India is catching up with Western Europe and Northern America. What happens when wage differentials are no longer enough to differentiate an outsourced cost versus in-house provision. Something will have to change, as either profit will decrease or service charges will increase not a 'happy ending' scenario for the customer if it is the latter.

Medium Sized Organisations have benefited from Managed Services

For mid-range organisations these types of agreements were out of reach and not of interest to the bigger outsourcing and offshoring players. That did not stop a whole industry developing to support mid-tier IT environments with UK managed services companies embedding support staff, operating multiple skilled support teams working across many clients and sites.

As the UK market has moved to 24*7 operations even at the medium to SME level, support has had to adapt, and supporting 24*7 is not a doubling of effort it is at least a trebling of resources (3 x 8 Hour Shifts per day + weekends). This means that organisations have a choice uplift their headcount or pass this on to the managed services providers(MSP). The MSP, in turn, has to recruit and maintain a 24*7 shift rota or as many have now do have found their own offshore teams who can support and complement their UK teams with highly skilled technical staff and lower base costs.

As you can appreciate as more organisations move to 24*7 operations, support costs will keep rising and more heads are required to manage and support full stack (hardware, operating system, database, middleware, applications, HA /DR) and cloud-based operations. What happens if technical staffing costs reach parity as demand increases and removes any competitive advantage, is no longer a differentiator and keeps increasing the operational costs?

Automation is the future for Managed Services and IT Support?

Automation using enterprise-class tools such as UiPath are designed to increase throughput, worker response and manage higher volumes of work items and interaction. Whilst the current focus of automation projects is upon known manual processes, value will be created by adapting workloads and operations so that they can be automated and support humans.

Use Case for 24*7 Alerting and Oracle Automation Support

As an example, ONQU supports a large London University providing 24*7 support as part of the support function we were tasked with logging on to each server every weekend to download the log files for all of the Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server systems.

We would produce a health check and statistics report which was then compiled and sent to the database management team. This took around 4 hours per week. By automating this one function amongst many other manual and routine jobs, we were able to run a weekly schedule where everything is automated (even the presentation pack and sending via email).

Other areas of support adoption were SLA responses to incoming tickets and ongoing progress reports with alerts when SLA deadlines might be missed. If reached, escalation to our internal management team using alert emails are used, if we get too close to breaking the agreed SLA.

Benefits of IT Support Automation

Those of us who have worked in support environments have experienced multiple calls, tickets, with P1 issue resolutions all happening together in a short space of time. It is then easy to miss ticket responses or have to come out of ticket 1 just to respond and update ticket 2 which is of lesser importance whilst you then lose your train of thought.

The opportunity cost of this can mean failing on two fronts with continual revisiting the same problem again and again, and getting constantly disturbed and missing responses and their updates. With Automation, this cost is removed whilst improving both response times and ensuring service levels of met. The value is returned as costly service credits and penalties are removed.

There is another benefit as more systems and environments can be managed using less people and more effective support can be provided. Why offshore when you can leverage more value and productivity utilising support and managed services automation.

Summary

With the impending fallout from the COVID19 epidemic, many organisations will have to support more of their user base with less technical staff and with less budget. Managed Services companies will not want to fall foul of increased service expectations at such a sensitive time with fines or penalties and the threat of losing valuable customers.

With Offshoring becoming more expensive there needs to be another path that meets with the support demands of the 2020's and outsourcing and managed services will have to embrace Automation.

There is no path to automation, automation is the path and those that start sooner will reap the rewards faster and become more competitive, as customers will have no reason to leave.

Please contact ONQU to discuss how IT Support Automation can help your organisation lower support costs and improve services either at [email protected] or visit our 24*7 Managed Services Support Service.