Maintaining information-systems stability while accelerating innovation can be difficult due to the increasing complexity of IT distributed systems. However, that’s what organizations should continually do to stay competitive.

To drive innovation, it’s essential to transform IT operational performance to improve system reliability. Systematic IT process transformation can help by integrating cutting-edge technologies and methodologies to help organizations thrive. The transformation can be accelerated via practices that help align IT and business goals and guide innovation while streamlining operations.

Resiliency engineering frameworks – what they are and why you need them

To implement systematic process transformation, it’s crucial to use an integrated resiliency engineering (RE) framework that combines with application development practices. Resiliency engineering frameworks and constructs help create a proactive mindset that promotes an ethos of shared responsibility for resiliency to reduce interruptions.

DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE), IT Service management, and platform engineering form the foundation of RE frameworks. DevOps improves cooperation between development and operations teams and uses continuous integration, testing, delivery, and deployment (CI/CD) to speed product release times and boost systems reliability.

Leveraging a toolkit of service-level objectives (SLOs), continuous monitoring, error budgets, and risk management, SRE aligns with agile and DevOps practices to enhance traditional IT service management (ITSM) frameworks. The goal is to improve system performance and reliability and prevent failure scenarios or have good visibility to triage any incidents. Finally, platform engineering helps organizations standardize to build and maintain reliable, scalable infrastructure and platforms.

Combining frameworks, practices and methods to catalyze IT process transformation

Together, traditional ITSM and RE frameworks serve as powerful tools for systematic process transformation. ITSM is a holistic framework for managing IT services, while SRE emphasizes reliability and performance to improve operations and customer satisfaction. They balance technical and strategic goals: SRE stresses technical quality and reliability, while ITSM aligns system improvements and service operations with organizational business goals and governance policies.

For example, an RE approach uses SRE, DevOps, and platform engineering capabilities to build a better relationship between development and operations and improve developer productivity, while ITSM focuses on coordination to unify service delivery processes. Resiliency engineering improves backend reliability and performance, which directly affects the user experience, whereas ITSM analyzes user feedback and experience level agreements (XLA) to boost front-end services.

The interdependence between IT service management and resiliency engineering

There are key functions where these practices differ in approach but ultimately complement each other.

Incident management: ITSM has structured processes for incident management that focus on prevention via problem management. Alternately, RE goes beyond traditional ticketing systems, emphasizes automation, data-driven analysis, and post-incident investigation to prevent recurrence focusing on proactive response and advanced analytics to streamline workflows and accelerate resolution times. However, both aim to quickly restore services and mitigate impact – with RE using data-driven automation to enhance ITSM's process approach.

Problem management: ITSM finds incident root causes to inform recurrence mitigation solutions, while RE employs post-incident analysis to improve reliability with a continuous feedback loop. However, the goal of both is to avoid incidents, maintain ecosystem hygiene, or reduce incident frequency via root cause resolution.

Change management: ITSM leverages planning and deployment processes to reduce service disruption, while RE uses automation, testing, and measured rollouts to deploy changes with built-in rapid feedback loops to enable frequent and safe changes. Both, however, manage change-associated risk effectively, which maintains service-environment stability.

Capacity and performance management: ITSM monitors and enhances IT service performance to help ensure sufficient capacity. In contrast, RE uses observability capabilities and chaos engineering concepts to enhance system performance under stress. However, the goal for each is to improved stability and performance.

Service level management: ITSM defines and monitors service levels, emphasizing end-user experience through XLAs, while RE uses SLOs and error budgets to manage service reliability and availability targets. However, both use common reliability and performance measures.

Potential Benefits of systematic process transformation

• Enhanced efficiency and productivity with reduced costs: Optimizing and automating IT processes can eliminate many manual tasks, which can speed development and help organizations reallocate resources to more value-added work.
• Improved reliability and resilience: Implementing SRE leading practices boosts system resilience and reliability, leading to improved performance and higher value from investments.
• Faster time-to-market: Leveraging CI/CD pipelines fast-tracks feature and update releases, enabling organizations to innovate faster and respond faster to disruptions and market shifts.
• Enhanced customer experience: Reliable, efficient IT services improve the performance and reliability of customer-facing applications, which can increase customer satisfaction and can enable higher ROI on tech investments.
• Continuous improvement and innovation: An iterative approach to process transformation builds a culture of responsibility and continuous innovation, enabling higher value delivery.

The path to better IT resilience

Systematic IT process transformation can make organizations more agile, stable, and innovative. Enterprises that embrace such structured, iterative process improvements can unlock new efficiencies through optimized operations, and they can consistently outperform competitors to deliver greater value and secure lasting competitive advantage.