Using the power of Intellectual Capital for Operation Maturity – (Connected TAC)

There are quite a number of concepts of Operations Maturity models defined by various groups.

Some would explain in the context of - Beginning, Emerging, Scaling, Optimizing and Innovating (Service leadership forum) while others like Gartner would define it in terms of Survival, Awareness, committed, proactive, Service Aligned and Business Partnership.

As the customer enhances towards the operation Maturity model, 4 concepts primarily needs to be understood clearly. Reactive, Proactive, Pre-emptive and Predictive.

Reactive - e.g " I am Down"

Proactive - e.g " I am on the verge of being Down and here is the reason"

Predictive - e.g " I have some issues that may affect the normal operations, here is the reason and this is how I can be fixed"

Pre-emptive - e.g " I have some issues that may impact normal operations, here is the reason and I have taken actions to fix it."

In most of the situations the Operations team uses these concepts loosely and that forms the basis of the state of Maturity level in an organization.

Understanding it a bit better......

As the incidents are reported, solutions are provided to such incidents either thru incident Management or Problem Management process. Many companies track and store the incident and solution data in their repositories. As the products evolve and move from a new production introduction to a stable mature product, the repository to trouble shoot issues gets better.

What do companies do with these huge data collection? Is there an effective way that companies can use these data collected over their worldwide experiences? Can we automate the use of Intellectual capital to give better experience to the customer?

This forms the basis of helping the customer move to the next stage of effective operation Maturity model and the utilizing Intellectual Capital effectively is the key to achieve the goal.

Many times in my Career, our customers have asked us, why is the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) engineer in the Prime so effective? How is he/she different form the Engineers we hire with the same qualifications and Knowledge?

The answer lies in the engineer’s access to the rich Intellectual Capital and the Tools.

Companies are now taking advantage of the technology to utilize this Intellectual Capital and automate it to resolve issues faster, truly moving towards the concept of predictive to pre-emptive.

As the BUs (Business Unit) and Product Managers develop products, they build in features to identify and report the state of the device. This can be diagnosed and collected at the customer end to be processed by the vendor Intellectual Capital using powerful database engines and analytics tools giving an easily human readable reports.

Many companies are moving towards these direction of Automation and companies like Cisco have launched "Connected TAC" which can use WhatsUp Gold from IP Switch or NetBrain for information collection to automate issue identification. This form their strategy moving towards Digitized transformation.

Using the customer collected device status to be compared with the vendor Intellectual Capital comprising of various database including Sales, Contract Management, Alerts, Known Issues backed by powerful processing and Analytics forms the basis of the Next Generation Connected Digital Experience in operations.