Large Government Organization

About Large Government Organization

Like many other government agencies, this organization had to manage budget cuts in the last couple of years. Therefore, continuous innovation has to be justified and supported by cost efficiencies. One of the ICT infrastructure departments provides a monitoring and reporting environment for nearly 100 application development teams within the organization. They saw the potential that increased automation could bring to their event handling and incident management processes, which contained numerous manual, error-prone human interventions. With automated self-service, the team could give more responsibility to application owners, create closed loop processes, and design workflows other teams could also use.

To realize these benefits, the organization implemented a range of Micro Focus IT Operations Management solutions, including Micro Focus Universal CMDB, Operations Orchestration (OO), Operations Bridge, and Service Manager. These solutions are leveraged in the 24/7 operations control room, which manages all monitoring, configuration, and service events, resulting in closed loop remediation.

OO is positioned as the key to streamlining the process. Application teams use their own automation tools, but OO acts as an overarching orchestration umbrella so that the entire chain of events can be automated and integrated end to end.

The team worked closely with Netherlands based Novictus, a consultancy specializing in process automation. Adem Özdemir, managing director at Novictus, showed the possibilities through a Proof-of-Concept (POC). “We worked together to identify repetitive and manual processes, for instance upgrading a Windows system, daily checks for different tools, data migration, server decommissioning requests, or deletion of CIs from the CMDB,” Adem said. “There are steps to be followed, and we felt these could be orchestrated in an OO-driven workflow, which would be owned by the internal customer. They are ideally placed to manage their own workflows because they have the best knowledge on what needs to be monitored and reported.”

Security is a key priority within the organization, so the team needed to ensure full security for all automated workflows. Adem worked together with the customer team to create a code of conduct for teams to build clean orchestration workflows, embracing the automation tools that are already in use across the different development teams.

Although still in the early stages, Adem has received great feedback on how orchestrated workflows will benefit the organization as a whole. “Just defining the end-to-end process in OO will dramatically improve the organization’s time to delivery,” he said. “When different stakeholders and multiple steps are involved, there are inevitably delays and misunderstandings in handover. By creating end-to-end secure automation and following an agreed-upon structure, the organization will deliver faster with fewer resources.”

A good example of faster delivery is in the online infrastructure service portal within the organization. Staff can request account creation, access to applications, and commissioning and decommissioning of servers. These requests are logged as tickets in Micro Focus Service Manager. The effective integration between Service Manager, Operations Bridge (to monitor service performance and user experience), Universal CMDB (for a single source of all assets), and OO creates a dataflow that can reduce the delivery of a new server from several months to just days.

According to Adem, it was important to introduce a user-friendly solution and OO absolutely delivers on that front. When developing new automation, Novictus ends each sprint with a demo so that their internal customers can track the workflow’s development and get full understanding of its capabilities.

“OO’s drag-and-drop graphical user interface is easy to understand,” Adem said. “I see colleagues building full workflows after watching a brief introductory training video.”