In a recent blog on operational adoption published in SOAWorld, Netuitive Founder Bob Farzami pointed to a white paper examining the challenges standing in the way of proactive management and outlined a methodology for best practices to ensure rapid time-to-value and implementation success. Titled Building the Proactive IT Operations Team   Technology + Process + People = Proactive, the paper outlines key elements for successful operational adoption of predictive analytics and introduced a focused and evolutionary approach to adoption called VIP.

The VIP approach matches and leverages natural relationships between three tiers of SMEs with the three levels of VIP. It starts with providing Visibility for level-3 application support team members into a wide range of performance metrics across traditional monitoring silos. The next stage of adoption involves delivering performance-oriented fault Isolation capabilities to level-2 subject matter experts (SME). The final stage of adoption involves providing Proactive alarm notifications to level-1 operators who assume 24x7 shifts.

Later on the paper outlines the importance of Tiger Teams and role-based training as critical to ensuring broad adoption of solutions. But there is one very important additional element worth noting. The VIP approach hinges on important collaboration between customers and vendors. At each level, the customer is sharing their superior knowledge of their applications and environment with the vendor who shares their expertise in the product and technology.  For level-3s, visibility means collaborating with professional services to create the right service views.  For level-2s, isolation requires collaboration to help them learn how to use the vendor's tools effectively to easily identify fault isolation.  For level-1s, proactive escalation procedures require collaboration to create effective run books. It is this inherently collaborative approach at each level that is at the heart of VIP and allows you to achieve these value milestones.

As the leader of Netuitive's professional services organization, I am tasked daily with executing cut and dry enterprise software licensing agreements and evolving them into collaborative working customer relationships. I get a front row seat when business leaders reach out to meet with IT to better understand the impact of IT and application performance on the business. Typically the answer involves operational adoption of predictive IT analytics capable of correlating IT, applications, and business metric data.

For one large telecommunications company, their goal of understanding the business impact of IT was achieved when the VIP approach led to creation of critical service views in the context of their point of sales (POS) operations. Today, this global wireless provider is in production for the POS system and is now evaluating VIP for additional applications and services.

As you look for solutions that correlate IT and application performance with business impact, know that the best providers will push a collaborative agenda before contracts are signed and will be vocal about offering best practices and data gathering workshops designed to drive productive collaboration.

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