The Challenge

Multiple researches have shown that the most successful businesses are the ones which are able to quickly adapt to the change. They are able to “sense” changes of the market, experiment and adjust themselves in the orders of magnitude faster than the less successful ones.

Such organisations are optimized for the flow. And one of the key aspects of such an ability for quick adaptation is theirs IT Platform. Well-done and maintained IT platform acts as a key business enabler and is not a “one more cost center”.

But how did they achieve such a “well-done” state of an IT Platform? And what does “IT Platform” even mean?

At Service360 we believe that IT Platform consists of 4 components: Services, Tech, People and the Processes. And “well-done” state of the Platform means that each of those 4 components are proactively maintained and taken care of.

For each of the components, though, maintenance and care mean different things:

• For Services it means that the state of each and every Service (or application, library, etc) is known and “as expected”. All Services have owners, proper maintenance and usage documentation. They are proactively monitored for misbehaviour. If any failure happens then the recovery process is known and documented and the failure itself is treated as a learning opportunity and processed and documented accordingly. DevOps movement did a great job providing visibility into this topic.
• For the People it means that they are not over-/under-worked. Their cognitive load is maintained at reasonable level and people are challenged enough but not burned-out or bored.
• For the Tech component of the Platform proper maintenance is mostly governance and reasonable standardisation. It can be quite tricky to maintain balance between staying agile/flexible and over-standardization that kills creativity and experimentation spirit (which we think is essential for all business to have).
• Process maintenance means that each and every Process is documented and its effectiveness is reassessed and adjusted regularly.

Getting all 4 of those components done right is not an easy task.

The Solution

If you want to get your IT Platform to a state where it will become an enabler rather than a cost center, or, maybe you want to move even faster than you do now - you need to change something. To make some decisions and take some steps.

We believe that in order to make good decisions one must be aware of the current situation. And this is where we see Service360s' place in the journey to a “well-done IT Platform”.

We have built Service360 around two core concepts. And those are - Transparency and Ownership.

Service360 provides an unprecedented transparency into 3 out of 4 components: Services, Tech and People (The People). Information about current state of the platform and potential deficiencies is available in a couple of clicks. Of course all of the auto-detected deficiencies are paired with actionable advises on mitigation options.

The best part - the way we have built Service360 this transparency comes at almost no cost! Most of the data is collected automatically and does not require any kind of human interaction.

Let us tell you how do we achieve that.

PS: Regarding the forth component, the Processes, we hope to address it also in a while. Just a bit later. :)