How Mature is Your Operations Process?

Submitted by Adam Reeves, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

We held a joint webinar with Riverbed recently - NetScout and Riverbed Webinar As a part of the webinar we educated the audience about the Operations Process Maturity model. It’s a model that applies NetScout’s packet-flow technology to a maturity-based process continuum for monitoring and troubleshooting IT performance. Specifically, we divide the maturity model into three incremental categories that build upon each other as follows (from least mature to most):

- Incident Management – This stage, employed by those with the least mature operations management capabilities, is reactive and relies on packets for troubleshooting typically after a problem has been reported by an end user.  This stage requires a fast, efficient, and effective way to respond and resolve issues.

- Problem Management – Building upon the capabilities detailed in Incident Management, this is a proactive stage, utilizing packet flows to take a more systemic approach that focuses on broader views of activities and reduction of incidents by recognizing and addressing potential problems via better visibility and forecasting/planning. 

- Performance Management – Building upon the previous two stages, this service-aware stage is employed by companies at the most mature level of the continuum and allows performance issues to be tracked and understood in terms of specific business impact. This stage is utilizes key performance indicators (KPIs) so that incidents are wholly avoided via intelligent early warnings and better performance planning throughout the lifecycle of an application or service.

In addition to educating participants on the model we also asked them how mature their process is. 32.7% responded that they are in the reactive, Incident Management stage; 22.1% claimed to be at the proactive, Problem Management level; and 15.6% claimed to be in the service-aware, Performance Management stage. The remaining 24.7% claimed to not have anything in place. Without performing a more in-depth analysis and looking at responses by size of company and vertical industry, my quick takeaway on this is that companies have a lot of opportunity to expand their coverage, and adopt a more mature view of the operations process. Where do you see your company fitting into the Process Maturity Model? Let us know in the comments.