The (Digital) Operations Control Center - Part 1: Finally opening the doors...

A large majority the companies I work with are using SAP Solution Manager to manage SAP centric solution End to End in real time and many of them have already built the Operation Control Center (OCC) with us and SAP partners.

Our joint goals when implementing the Operation Control Center (Customer Organization, ITIL Processes and SAP Solution Manager and 3rd party Tools) is to achieve:

• Higher business availability, and business user satisfaction

• Higher IT efficiency by industrialization of Operations

• Transparency on the operational state of the solution

• Transparency on component integration

• Continuous improvement of Business and IT

This, of course, follows the IT industry best practices for software life-cycle management and operations. If we look at it from a real-estate perspective the model to follow has been the NASA Control Center approach, i.e. big room, big screens, everyone together and if you are not there then you can always (unfortunately) get a call or a notification email, or worse an invite to conference call. 

In the recent projects I have been involved in, we realized very early that this would not work (anymore) for the following reasons:

• Availability  (always-on) , User Experience (perfect, seamless) and Performance (real-time) Key Performance Indicators are tougher than ever

• Global projects driven from multiple organizations, locations and timezones (no big room but a large Digital Project and Operations Rooms)

• Agile and DevOps approach as opposed to Waterfall and ITIL processes driven

• Joint Implementation and Operations with our customers and partners

• Hybrid Cloud landscape infrastructure with multiple partners involved. 

• Multiple failed attempts to adopt a common platform for all involved parties (SAP, customers, Ops, Dev, PMO...) : wiki, document storage sites, IM, email, SMS... 

While the objectives remained the same for the digital new normal (e-commerce, banking to name 2 major industries), i.e. 99.99% availability, best in class user experience, performance and lean operations, we had to manage the new reality and its impact to our way we think and live in IT Operations, fundamentally change by opening the doors of the OCC. 

In addition to that, we had to transform the traditional OCC in the Digital Operation Control Center leveraging the operations capabilities already in place while breaking down the silos of Organizations and Enterprises. 

We wanted to provide real time and meaningful information to all relevant parties in the Digital Project/Operations Room and we found out the most efficient and effective way was to use the social networks and Wechat our platform of choice (it started in China).

So we started by creating groups (also called enterprise accounts) where the main parties join & participate, that alone helped a lot in keeping the extended team together, providing transparency, increasing trust and breaking down the silos as critical topics were discussed openly.

But someone or something was missing: the Operation Control Center itself, or let's say its backbone, SAP Solution Manager. So we come up with a relatively simple integration (see below):

And achieved the following (just to name a few):

• Higher Availability, Better User Experience and Performance through Reduction of Mean Time to Detection (MTD) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTR) 

• More Trust and Effectiveness thanks 100% transparency (blaming culture disappeared), especially during deployments 

• More Engagement from all parties (Dev, Ops, Biz, PMO), increased Efficiency (need less people) and 0 endless conference call 

A simple yet meaningful integration changed almost everything in the way we work and behave, building on our success we also extended our integration and build a cockpit for administration.

Below are the extension options for Integration:

• Bidirectional communication between any Social Media and SAP Solution Manager

• Enable rich context communication between any Social Media and SAP Solution Manager, e.g. figures, files

• Using Social Media to receive any notification from any source with sending API.

• Sending notification to any Social Media with needed API.

Conclusion, the velocity of application development and changes is increasing, and with it, the demand of “Bullet Proof” quality (availability, UX and Performance). Customers’ business targets to build new capabilities and business models at speed and scale and expect the IT Organizations to deliver. For Operations it means on one side to open up, change the culture and come up earlier in the project itself, not good enough to wait for integration and on the other side it means building its own integrated tools on top of the Operation Control Center to become Digital as well (more on SAP Solution Manager 7.2). 

That's all for now, if you are interested in getting more details please leave a comment and we can follow up.

Next episode with Smart Operations, SAP HANA predictive analytics applied to IT and Business Operations...

Cheers, 

Sebastien,