Service Catalog: It Can Deliver More Value Than You Think

It’s inevitable that a good service desk attracts traffic. But what happens when the traffic picks up, the
requests come heavy and the time grows shorter for responding effectively? A new approach is
required and innovation must speak to the matter. This session will open up the kinds of challenges and suggest relevantly appropriate responses to make the IT Service desk a more tamed and manageable center of activity --- without having pull your hair out to do it!

We will learn:
1) What makes a good IT service desk effective and desirable?
2) How does it respond to requests with sound and clear management?
3) When does the level of activity warrant sounding the alarm?
4) What innovative range of responses may be considered?
5) How do we keep the IT service desk tamed and timely?

With global work environments shifting, the need for scalability and automation is urgent to handle the influx of employee requests for IT support—and to offer user satisfaction in an anxious time. Demands on the IT service desk include the challenge of licensing costs, handling more common processes and tasks, enabling higher levels of employee self-service, and speeding issue resolution.

AI-enabled employee self-service can auto-resolve the majority of repetitive requests, freeing the IT team to focus on business-critical issues. Aisera enables automation of repetitive IT tasks, actions and workflows while allowing workers to auto-resolve their issues using Conversational AI and Conversational RPA—uniting people without physical contact. Aisera also leverages the power of AI with existing ticketing systems to bring users and services together, despite social distancing, for vital business continuity. Remote workers get the streamlined support they need to stay productive.

- No additional capital resources are needed to handle employee support requests from remote workers
- Companies can leverage out-of-the-box AI solutions to accelerate IT service delivery in real-time, using their existing service desks
- Conversational AI and RPA can improve employee experience at scale to ensure 24x7 business continuity and support

Testing can be the long pole in our deployment pipelines. Without test automation, we are forced to choose between poor velocity and insufficient regression testing (and the resulting risks and quality problems).

But test automation is no magic “silver bullet”! If we don’t approach it in a disciplined and structured way, it can become its own source of problems and a time-sink for our team. The Test Automation Pyramid provides a framework for a structured and rigorous approach to testing.

We will use the Pyramid as our touchstone for delving into some excellent guidance on test automation from both the Agile and the DevOps communities, like:

- Divide and conquer: How can we treat test automation not as a single big problem, but the Agile way – as a series of small workable problems.

- Unit testing means what? A clear purpose for Unit Testing that translates into clear direction on what it should and should not be.

- What comes before Integration testing? A look at what it takes to actually test interfaces. (Hint: It’s not integration testing!)

- GUI-less Functional test automation: Full testing of the functionality of our application without the complexity and brittleness of going through the graphical user interface (GUI).

- An architecture for automating functional testing: Automated functional tests become much more maintainable when we use a multi-layered architecture to create them.

- Testing in the CI/CD Pipeline: How can we fit all of this testing into our Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline and still have it complete quickly?

ITSM is a set of policies, processes and procedures used to deliver standard Customer IT services and the resulting support and operational activities. While DevOps is a set of practices which combine software development (Dev) and operations (Ops) activities to shorten the software development lifecycle by enabling the continuous delivery of high quality software.

ITSM and DevOps are often considered to be incompatible, however as the pace of change accelerates organizations that manage to hit the sweet spot of operating ITSM frameworks with DevOps speed of delivery will gain a competitive advantage from the resulting synergies.

For organizations that have traditionally been focused on traditional ITSM skilling and/or reskilling to support a DevOps cultural pivot and DevOps tooling can be challenging.

DXC Technology runs mission-critical systems with the latest technology innovations to deliver better business outcomes and new levels of performance, competitiveness and experiences for our customers. In this talk we will share how we are skilling and reskilling our workforce and helping our clients through "Online DevOps Dojos". The Online DevOps Dojo is a series of learnings and hands on micro labs which follow the guidelines of reference books such as "Accelerate" and the "DevOps Handbook". More that online learning experiences, we are talking here about online lab environments, supported by a (funny) story of a fictitious team.

Half presentation, half demo, this talk will open your eyes on skilling and opportunities linked to training for DevOps the "Dojo" way.

One last thing: the learning modules are open source: we invite the DevOps community to use and also contribute!

The relationship between ITSM and DevOps has been described as both a match made in heaven and a significant culture clash. However your business sees it, it’s clear that in 2021 businesses need to be firmly on board with both in order to create a winning digital employee experience and deliver to customers efficiently and quickly.

Join this expert panel, where DevOps and ITSM leaders share how ITSM and DevOps can work together to achieve superior outcomes. They’ll discuss:

- Why it’s important that, in the words of opensource.com, DevOps and ITSM ‘call a truce’ - and how this can be done
- Why it’s crucial teams focus more on collaboration and outcomes rather than processes and outputs
- Lessons learned from pitting ITSM and DevOps against one another, and how they can transform business cultures - and bottom lines
- And more

Most of the times, we see ITSM and DevOps at two end of the spectrum and considered polar opposite but guess what opposites attract.
There is rich and mature aspects of ITSM on one hand and agility of DevOps on another and together they can synergize to create a beautiful and long lasting marriage within the organization

More and more organizations are moving vital workloads on to cloud architecture, especially their data. However, many are not ensuring that the same level of monitoring that they would perform in an on-premises environment. Performance problems on cloud infrastructures don’t simply result in slower databases, but in higher overall costs. This session will walk you through why you need to monitor your databases in the cloud. We’ll discuss some of the built-in architectures available to you using Azure and AWS as examples. We’ll also walk through additional resources from building your own monitoring solution to taking advantage of third party tooling. Moving to the cloud carries all sorts of advantages, but you need to be prepared to appropriately monitor your databases too. This session will help you get started.

Enterprise agility—the ability to adapt fast and seize new opportunities while reducing costs—is critical for an organization to survive and thrive in this evolving digital age. While the rewards of bringing about agile transformation are significant, how many companies really achieve key results? Did you know the success rate is less than 10%? Even organizations that follow various agile methodologies do not adhere to them across the board, resulting in what’s known as agile-waterfall or wagile approaches.

Is there a pragmatic way to become truly agile?

Yes, by embracing programmability. This approach goes beyond infrastructure automation, which is a common practice, by enabling programmatic access to automate actions, procedures, processes, and runtimes used in an application’s entire lifecycle. With programmability and end-to-end automation, teams can increase productivity and flexibility and quickly decommission repeatable tasks; they can also spend more time on implementing innovative ideas.

Asanka will share his experience from applying programmability in successful projects delivered iteratively, rapidly and in a timely way. In addition to the associated lean methodology, he will discuss a supportive reference architecture.

Every company wants to accelerate, deliver more, faster, and increase customer value and return profit to stakeholders. Every DevOps business understands core metrics but advancing values requires resolving known unknowns behind the initial numbers. Accomplishing initial metrics leads to some understanding but allows deriving additional details. Subsequent metrics should be small, focused on acceleration and provide clarity to feedback. Provided examples demonstrate how time to change, deployment frequency, restoration time, and change failure rates can be deconstructed to provide advanced solutions. Software tools exist to easily manage telemetry everywhere and increase overall value through advanced metrics

1. Defining advanced metrics & DevOps
2. Building from the four basic metrics
3. Applying metrics to your organization

Key Takeaway: Understanding why metrics matter and how they apply to your company

How do you know your feature is working perfectly in production? If something breaks in production, how will you know? Will you wait for a user to report it to you? What do you do when your staging test results do not reflect current production behavior? In order to test proactively as opposed to reactively, try testing in production! You will have an increased accuracy of test results, your tests will run faster due to the elimination of bad data, and you will have higher confidence before releases. This can be accomplished through feature flagging, canary releases, setting up a proper CI/CD pipeline, and data cleanup. You will leave this talk with strategies to mitigate risk, to better your understanding of the steps to get there, and to shift your company’s testing culture, so you can provide the best possible experience to your users. At the end of the day, we don't care if your features work in staging, we care if they work in production.

Learn how to modernize your Java application monitoring and dashboarding with Prometheus and Grafana. There's a lot of information out there when it comes to monitoring a Kubernetes cluster with Prometheus, but, in the modern enterprise landscape, applications are still what matters. Learn how to leverage Prometheus and Grafana to build slick, modern monitoring dashboards and threshold logic for Java applications.

How converting your IT support user guides into animated videos can provide granular level learning to feed into corporate L&D objectives. Combine this with the adoption of a "design thinking" approach to your service innovations, can produce improved results in deployment, through increased end-user engagement, helping to drive up your innovation KPIs.

Nationwide is in the midst of an organisation-wide pivot, realigning from a largely functional organisation to one fully aligned to our ‘Member’ needs. We’re calling these our ‘Missions’.

We have made some incredible progress with our Ways of Working including adopting ideas from DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Intelligent Control and more generally Agile, and this has triggered revolution our ITSM processes.

At our most successful we have built platforms where we can go from concept to releasing new services into production in less than two weeks. But our systems landscape is vast and our journey is far from complete.

In this session we will discuss how critical finding a synergy between DevOps and ITSM has proven to be. We'll share some of our key lessons learnt, our future ambition, and the challenges we are still grappling with.

While getting so many benefits on DevOps and automation, nothing is more ubiquitous than the measuring the progress. There is a tremendous value of each stage of the delivery pipeline, from project inception to application deployment into the production environment and beyond on supporting operationally. When you collect the right data and visualize them properly, you will have continuous feedback on various stages to all stakeholders, great transparency and visibility, traceability of any given changes throughout the lifecycle, most importantly learning from each success and failure as a team. However, there are some challenges in selecting the right metrics, collecting data on various distinct development tools, overseeing many projects with different development teams and correlate distinct sources of data

Ever run code changes through CI/CD and everything passed clean and green in the pipeline checks, then experience undetected critical failures in the live target environment post-deployment? This scenario is very common and impacts many teams and organizations even the teams with the most rigorous testing practices. In most cases this behavior can be eliminated by running basic Smoke Tests on the application live in their target environments. Smoke testing apps in target environments will expose unwanted patterns/behaviors and provide a solid understanding of how the application will perform.

In this talk Angel will discuss the advantages of implementing Smoke Test patterns into CI/CD pipelines using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). He will discuss how teams can leverage automation to ensure apps are tested live in target environments which provide valuable insights pre-deployment. Angel will also demonstrate how to leverage IaC to provision Kubernetes clusters, deploy apps, test live then destroy all the resources created in a single CI/CD pipeline run.