Intelligent Communications Can Help DevOps Streamline Processes

We visited with Sendhil Jayachandran with xMatters to discuss how layering intelligent communications across an enterprise can help DevOps streamline processes. 

ADM: What is intelligent communications?

Jayachandran: Intelligent Communications connects insights from any system to the people that matter in order to accelerate essential business processes. It integrates with your business solutions and enables you to stay abreast of any notification, whether it’s an incident handled by IT or an infrastructure issue managed by operations. 

Intelligent Communications helps you ensure that the appropriate individuals and groups for any situation are identified, notified, and taking action. To close the loop, it manages and drives forward the underlying workflow from originating systems.

ADM: What are key hurdles in enterprises' DevOps adoption?

Jayachandran: Enterprises face numerous challenges in adopting DevOps initiatives:

- The technology challenge requires bringing in modern, agile tools alongside legacy systems. 

- The stakeholder challenge requires alignment among a variety of employees within business and IT. 

- The process challenge calls for agile DevOps processes to be managed alongside standard ITSM workflow. 

ADM: Why do stakeholders outside of development and operations need to be aligned with DevOps initiatives?

Jayachandran: Stakeholders outside of development and operations need to be aligned with key DevOps initiatives in order to ensure that overarching business objectives and goals are accounted for. 

Each stakeholder requires a specific amount of context in order to execute their role - whether it requires customer communications or interactions with internal product teams. These individuals help ensure that teams don’t get tunnel vision in the midst of high-velocity, agile processes.   

ADM: Why do DevOps business processes require further management when  it comes to communications?

Jayachandran: It’s ironic that DevOps is about streamlining processes and accelerating workflow, yet communications causes stagnation. Organizations need to minimize vulnerability to inconsistent communications, bring structure to chaos and deliver relevant information to the relevant people.

ADM: Why is intelligent communications driven by an essential part of an enterprise DevOps toolset?

Jayachandran: Intelligent communications drives personalized communication at scale, and at high velocity. Intelligent communications connects legacy and modern systems, drives standard and agile processes, and empowers stakeholders across the business with the required level of context for any situation.  

ADM: Tell us about the  xMatters Integration Platform.

Jayachandran: The xMatters Integration Platform connects modern and legacy systems and business processes to fundamentally alter the way development and operations teams work together in a DevOps environment. By doing so, standard IT service management processes can be managed in conjunction with DevOps processes.  

xMatters automates, operationalizes, and contextualizes communications within key DevOps processes. Automation capabilities allows firms to create trigger-based workflow in order to ensure that scenarios get addressed in exactly the same way and reduces human dependencies. 

Operationalized communications adheres to set work flow and also relays information back to processes from originating systems. Contextualization delivers the right level of information based on a stakeholder’s role in a given process.   

ADM: What are the implications of connecting multiple systems that drive completely unique processes together?

Jayachandran: Connecting multiple systems together results in multi-step business processes derived from any number of systems. For example, a notification from an application monitoring system triggers the creation of a support ticket, drives communications via a ChatOps solution, instantiates a conference bridge with the appropriate team members, and relays information back to the support ticket.