Typically, when you think of IT operations, you think of some person sitting in a dark room administering a server or you might imagine a person sitting at a cramped desk, overseas,answering the phone. Although you would be partially correct, IT operations are much more than keeping the lights on, or fixing whatever problem you’re facing. As we started this journey, we began by discussing the goal of every business: generate revenue, maximize profits, and improve client experience. To differentiate yourself from others, whatever you do, ensure you are contributing to these three goals.

So how does an IT operations analyst help with revenue, profits, and client experience?

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Let's take a look at how you can impact revenue.

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As you harvest the IT data for insights, you might discover that the business is facing performance and capacity issues when items go on sale. 

You find that when you have thousands of people suddenly coming to your website to make a purchase, you don’t have enough Servers with sufficient CPU and Memory. Or you don’t have enough storage to handle all of the requests. As a result, the website will crash or it will be extremely slow, causing people to give up. This results in revenue losses. 

In this case, if you know that at certain times of the day or certain days of the week or certain weeks of the month,there will be a demand, you will want to recommend to the business to make sure it has adequate resources to meet that demand. So, if you are a service provider then you can make a business case to sell the business additional hardware and services.

Another area of revenue could be additional investments in the application and infrastructure monitoring, based on the number and types of outages.

What this means is every business typically monitors its resources to make sure they’re functioning as expected.When something happens, the monitoring tool Will send an alert. Think about your car, and the gauge that tells you how much gas you have left, as soon as it’s down to a certain limit,it will light up and tell you that you’re about to run out of gas. In IT, it is the same if the server is using too much processing power or too much memory or if the storage is using too much disk, then the monitoring tool will notify you before those resources hit 100% and crash.

So, if you can do some analysis and you find deficiencies in the current monitoring tool, or, if you find new emerging technologies in monitoring tools. Then you could potentially make a business case, to make additional investments. And if you work for a service provider,this could be new revenue.

Another example of revenue generation through IT operations analytics, is when you look at all the assets that you are responsible for supporting, and find that some assets are not being billed.You can bring this forward to ensure that proper billing is taking place and revenue is not being lost.

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Now lets, look at how IT operational analytics can impact profits.

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let’s start with staff utilization. As an IT operations analyst, if you look at the utilization of all the staff, you might discover that you might be able to minimize labour costs by increasing staff utilization. Increasing staff utilization could potentially result in fewer staff being needed.

For example, if you look at the service desk, and you assume that you need hundred people answering 25 calls a day at nine minutes per call, and if you were able to reduce the nine minutes down to eight minutes, you might be able to cut your team by 10 to 20 people. And if each person costs you approximately $80,000 a year, imagine the savings you can deliver.

Another area where you can reduce costs and contribute to the profits, is by optimizing IT systems. What I mean by this is, imagine you have a host that can handle 20 virtual machines, now if you can get a more powerful host, you might be able to handle 30 virtual machines. Sowhat this means is instead of potentially having 10 hosts, you might only need six. Although the cost of the more powerful hosts might be more, the overall savings will be much more.

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Now, Let’s take a look at how IT operational analytics can impact the client experience.

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One way to improve client experience, isto reduce the number of service disruptions so the clients don’t experience any downtime and they can continue working and being productive. This means, if you are proactively taking actions to improve the environment, then the number of issues that clients will face will decrease. Another Way you can improve client experience is to anticipate the number and types of issues that the clients will face, and ensure your teams have the skills,capability, and capacity, to respond to, and resolve those issues, in a timely manner.