While more efficient management of IT KPIs and incidents remains highly important, and Capgemini’s Enterprise Automation Fabric addresses these challenges, it now goes further and enables organizations to relate the impact of missed IT KPIs and incidents to individual business KPIs.
Not all IT KPIs are created equal, so Enterprise Automation Fabric incorporates a 3-level CMDB linking business processes, applications, and IT infrastructure. This mapping of business KPIs to application KPIs to infrastructure KPIs enables organizations to identify the potential business consequences of particular IT incidents. For example, for a retailer in the Netherlands, Enterprise Automation Fabric can predict the impact on shipping volumes if a particular issue happens with the IT infrastructure and this is not addressed within, say, 48 hours.
In general, Enterprise Automation Fabric can be set up to trigger automation or generate an alert to a business owner if a particular business KPI is identified as being at risk.
So, what is Capgemini Enterprise Automation Fabric?
As the name implies, Enterprise Automation Fabric is a reference toolset and framework consisting of a series of components that can be integrated with an organization’s current IT management investments. The toolset consists of interwoven third-party and Capgemini assets. It supports the management of the entire IT estate across cloud infrastructure, on-premise data center infrastructure, end-user computing, and applications. As appropriate, it links with the client’s existing monitoring solutions or utilizes its own preferred options.
Key components of the Enterprise Automation Fabric architecture include:
- Its CMDB (configuration management database)
- AIOps. This is central to “observability” with the CMDB structure captured by Capgemini’s AIOps solution, typically Splunk, augmented by proprietary Capgemini assets. AIOps covers functions such as anomaly detection, event correlations, and service impact assessment
- ITSM. Infrastructure management across multi-layer components, covering functions such as ticket management, incident management, and service request management
- Automation utilizing unattended and attended bots.
Once an anomaly is identified, Capgemini’s ITSM layer, built on ServiceNow, creates an incident. Capgemini data-driven assets augment ServiceNow in areas such as assisted resolution and intelligent dispatcher.
Once the incident is captured in the ITSM, it can be addressed using automation solutions. These include both intrusive automation, such as RPA and managing infrastructure as code, and human-in-the-loop automation. In infrastructure, autonomous automation can currently handle around 50% of incidents without human involvement, typically exceeding 50% in the service request space. For application-related incidents, the level of autonomous resolution is typically in the range of 20%-40%.
Enterprise Automation Fabric includes infrastructure-related automation bots for health checks, service requests, remediation, and reporting across:
- Servers (228 bots used across client engagements)
- SAP (82 bots)
- Storage & backup (66 bots)
- Network (~20 bots).
Enterprise Automation Fabric Capture is a Capgemini asset that can be deployed to speed up incident identification and resolution in SAP environments. It allows SAP users to capture all the details on the screen, including the error code, in a structured Excel format and create an incident with extensive pre-populated structured data in the ITSM.
Enterprise Automation Fabric is cloud-native but has an on-premise option. This latter option is particularly relevant for organizations requiring business measurement data to remain within their onsite environments.
Capgemini Reduced Alerts by 86% for Consumer Electronics Company
The complexity of this company’s IT estate had steadily increased over time, leading to high-priority production incidents (P1 alerts), particularly impacting the company’s SAP Order Management applications and infrastructure.
Capgemini deployed an AIOps solution to integrate various monitoring tools across applications and IT infrastructure and introduced a single dashboard for improved visibility across all the monitoring and custom application alerts. This significantly reduced the number of alerts by, for example, identifying and suppressing false alerts and avoiding duplication of alerts, enabling the team to focus on a smaller number of genuine alerts.
At the start of the engagement, the company was experiencing around eight P1 alerts per month, and Capgemini was able to eliminate P1 alerts over six months. Overall, an 86% reduction in alerts was achieved.
Capgemini also created a catalog of automation scripts to assist in resolving the issues identified by AIOps and developed knowledge articles to augment the capability of the team to resolve issues that could not be automated and required manual resolution.
In a similar exercise for a major airport, which had previously managed its systems manually, Capgemini streamlined its IT operations and cut alert queues by half. The auto-healing solutions helped boost efficiency and achieved a 10% increase in SLA response times, reducing the manual workload significantly. The net result was a 98% reduction in incident turnaround time, largely due to now correlating 88% of the previously unrelated alerts.
While organizations can adopt Capgemini’s Enterprise Automation Fabric on an incremental basis, the keys to its successful application lie in its multi-tier observability capability, its ability to resolve incidents autonomously before they impact users, and its ability to link business performance to application and infrastructure KPIs. The overall Enterprise Automation Fabric also meshes with existing client investments, reusing key assets from the client where appropriate.
Capgemini is now enhancing the existing Fabric components with GenAI proficiency, applying GenAI widely from incident routing to automated response and alert resolution to deliver enhanced efficiency within the framework. NelsonHall will bring you more updates as Capgemini incorporates the capabilities of GenAI into Enterprise Automation Fabric.