It’s easy to see why developers and IT engineers should care about AIOps, which automates tasks (like incident remediation) that they would otherwise have to perform manually.
But what does the business get out of AIOps? How do AIOps-powered tools help improve business outcomes? Those questions are critical to answer for any organization considering an investment in AIOps solutions. Most businesses will be reluctant to adopt AIOps if they think it will merely simplify the lives of their technical teams without also helping the business as a whole.
To provide guidance in assessing the business impact of AIOps, let’s take a look at the top 5 business benefits of AIOps technology, based on the findings of the 2021 Enterprise Management Associates “State of AIOps” report.
Benefit 1: Improved IT/Business Alignment
Ensuring that the work performed by the IT organization actually supports business goals is a constant challenge for any organization. It’s easy for technical teams to fall into the trap of investing in flashy new technologies that don’t align with business goals or overhauling systems in ways that don’t make them any better from a business perspective.
AIOps helps avoid the pitfall of misguided initiatives by the IT organization. It does this in several ways:
- Making IT systems more responsive through automation, which in turn ensures that they deliver fully on their business value. In other words, instead of deploying expensive new tools that don’t react quickly enough to help the business, AIOps-powered solutions help ensure a positive ROI for IT initiatives.
- Reducing the cost of maintaining IT resources, which in turn increases the ability of IT investments to deliver business value.
- Reducing the amount of time that technical teams spend on manual work, and in turn increasing the time they can invest in innovation that benefits the business.
Benefit 2: Improved Quality of IT and Business Services
Along similar lines, AIOps translates to better IT services, which in turn improves the quality of business services.
In other words, when IT teams leverage AIOps, they can deliver software that performs better and achieves higher rates of availability, thanks to the ability of AIOps tools to find and fix problems automatically.
As a result, the quality of business services delivered to customers is stronger. End-users experience fewer disruptions and delays. This improvement generates direct business value by helping the business attract and retain customers.
Benefit 3: Improved End-User Experience
The ability of AIOps to enhance the customer experience offers additional business benefits that extend beyond attracting and retaining customers.
A stronger customer experience also strengthens the business’s brand. At the same time, it reduces the number of user complaints or requests that the IT team has to support, which in turn reduces IT costs. It makes sales and marketing easier, too, because it’s always easier to close deals when your business offers an optimal customer experience.
Benefit 4: Improved Business Process Efficiency
Optimizing process efficiency is a key focus for modern businesses – so much so that there is a whole cottage industry of software platforms dedicated to this purpose, in the form of BPM and ERP solutions.
While platforms like these are one way to improve business processes, AIOps takes process efficiency to the next level. Whereas BPM and ERP tools can help businesses identify the most efficient process architectures, AIOps minimizes the amount of manual effort required to perform and manage business processes. At the same time, the insights that AIOps tools yield may identify opportunities for improving process design that BPM and ERP systems miss.
Benefit 5: Accelerated Digital Transformation
Today, most businesses have already embraced digital transformation in one way or another. Yet the fact is that digital transformation is not something you just “do” in a single go. It’s an ongoing process.
No matter where your business happens to be today in its digital transformation journey, AIOps can help it advance further. AIOps allows businesses to make even better use of digital technologies like AI and automation. In this way, it helps organizations take the leap between what you could call digital transformation 1.0, which means practices like moving to the cloud, and digital transformation 2.0, which involves fully automating complex workflows and leveraging digital data to its full potential.
Conclusion: Don’t Underestimate AIOps
Again, it may be tempting for business stakeholders to dismiss AIOps as something that really only matters for technical teams, and that doesn’t meaningfully change outcomes for the business as a whole. Yet that’s simply not true. The ability of AIOps to help IT teams manage new volumes of complexity and work faster translates into direct improvements in business efficiency, customer experience, and more.