AIOps: The right Waze to managing IT and driving business success

Take GPS app Waze as an example. It provides live directions and traffic alerts while the philosophy of AIOps is to enhance IT operations through machine learning, analytics, and big data. Where Waze looks at the thousands of other cars on the road and incorporates user-submitted updates in real-time, AIOps can proactively and often pre-emptively detect incidents and correlate events across ecosystems.

AIOps is a far cry from the ‘robots are taking over’ scenario that tends to play out in the popular imagination. It is about using multi-layered technology platforms to make operations smarter and free up resources. To put it simply, it presents two key opportunities for businesses. Firstly, it enables faster management of IT issues, which in turn reduces the scope for reputational risks. It also drives customer centricity by helping businesses understand where customers would like them to innovate.

Navigating reputational risk

Managing cloud services is no straightforward feat. It is a challenging and resource-intensive process. Picture this: a warning sign pops up and the IT team has to get together to decide what to do about it. In the meantime, the business’ service is down and customers are filling the gap with a competitor’s service.

In today’s landscape of 24/7 delivery and ever-increasing customer expectations, customers are willing to voice their opinion across different platforms including social media if something is amiss in their experience. This means reputation and service delivery are more closely linked than ever before, and reputational damage can happen in a matter of seconds. 

To mitigate the risk of reputational damage, businesses need to be able to act immediately, have teams understand what’s happening across different services, and quickly gather and analyse feedback from a growing number of platforms. Many businesses have introduced a level of automation in an attempt to achieve this, through a chatbot advising when the next customer representative is available. But this is effectively just a quick fix solution as humans will still need to be part of the overall issue to develop a solution.

AIOps comes into its own here with its ability to automatically detect, diagnose, and in many cases can remediate service issues in real time. Codifying knowledge from previous incidents to find and fix future ones quickly and accurately – and with far less effort – to ultimately protect the business’ revenues and reputation.

Driving customer experience

When it comes to business data, there’s a difference between background noise and the messages customers want a business to hear. Keeping on top of customer feedback and understanding how much should be closely listened to is becoming increasingly complex, with more data types and sources to track.

With AIOps, businesses not only receive the right information but have faster access to it, enabling them to make better decisions. It can be used to correlate data across millions of customer journeys to identify patterns, developing a clearer understanding of how customers would like services delivered and opportunities to enhance the customer experience.

Much like Waze uses smart technology to alert users to traffic incidents and map the best possible route in real time, AIOps allows businesses to navigate issues and creates scope to improve at every juncture. It’s clear that Waze has transformed the way users travel and similarly, AIOps will transform IT management and allow IT teams to deliver real benefits back to the business in terms of revenue, reputation management, and customer happiness.