"I am really going to need a better understanding of the change impact on my business services before I start these projects next time"
Just as a body is a single unit comprised of many different and unique parts, which — though different — all work towards the achievement of a single end: that is, the well-being of the body, so too are modern organizations comprised of many constituent units that are interdependent and connected and yet behave somewhat autonomously within the overall organizational ecosystem.
And just as with a body, it is imperative that the many parts operate in unison with each other to ensure optimal health and function, so too is it imperative that the various constituent elements in an organization are aligned and cooperate in an accord to achieve optimal performance.
One common source of organizational disconnect, which disrupts the performance of the whole, is the fundamental challenge in bridging the gap between IT Operations and the business itself. IT Operations oftentimes exists in a silo, segregated from the rest of the organization, believed to be working behind the scenes to keep the customer and employee facing services online and accessible.
It is easy for IT to operate in a vacuum in most organizations because they have little (if any) input on what would traditionally be considered the core business. There's an often-employed expression in (American) football that is along these lines: if you don't hear the name of an offensive lineman during the game, it's a good thing: it means he's doing his job. And in many cases, IT Operations is viewed similarly. While they're — in reality — involved in all phases, ensuring availability of critical business services, we're generally only cognizant of their presence if something has gone wrong and needs to be fixed.
One natural consequence of this segregation is that IT Ops does not generally have a business-centric view of the world. Their epistemological framework is all nuts and bolts, servers and applications, switches, routers and firewalls. They're not necessarily attuned to how core IT components ultimately resolve to critical business services that employees and customers depend upon. In short: there's a substantive and natural gap between IT Ops and the business itself, and this gap will inevitably manifest itself in outages or other negative consequences if it is not bridged.
So that's the problem. And deploying ServiceWatch is a significant step towards resolving the problem. ServiceWatch shifts the epistemological framework of IT Ops, helping them perceive and understand their arena through a set of lenses that translate the nuts and bolts into a business-centric view of the organization. When adopted by IT, ServiceWatch succeeds in more fully integrating IT into the overall organizational ecosystem. Thus, supporting IT Ops in embracing the business, as opposed to feeling alienated within it.
The result is that the change impact analysis of IT issues can be easily understood, so IT can get to the root cause of business service problems quickly and accurately. This improves business service quality, and facilitates more efficient IT operations.
In short: many parts behaving as one body, will promote harmony and efficiency within your organization.
Next: Diagnosing Your Health or Business Service Dependencies. What's the Difference?
