These are questions Cisco set out to answer in the IT Operations Readiness Index, a global research study of more than 1,500 senior IT leaders. The heart of the IT Operations Readiness Index is a four-step model for IT operations maturity, focused on how organisations handle events they face (see Figure 1). As organisations advance along this continuum, they use data to look further into the future and continuously optimise their operations. Data-Driven Operations in Action Take a simple example: a network outage. A reactive organisation would have no warning before traffic stopped flowing. Teams of administrators would scramble to get systems back up and running.
A predictive or preemptive organisation would detect early indicators of the impending outage in real time (such as a cluster of error messages), diagnose the root cause, apply a fix, and reroute prioritised traffic to maintain service levels. Potentially, this could occur with no human involvement, as AI finds the patterns and automation executes the responses. Unlocking Operations Success The IT Operations Readiness Index validates the four-step maturity model and identifies the behaviours that set more advanced organisations apart.
IT leaders can use the model to benchmark themselves against their peers and chart a course for change. Let’s examine the findings.