Fletcher said Utah’s main need for AIOps is to augment increasingly scarce government employees. About 15 years ago, the Utah Department of Technology Services employed roughly 1,000 people, and that number has since dropped to 750. Augmenting staff is one of the great advantages of adopting AIOps for all state governments, Olson said.
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to attract and retain the operational talent that can do this work. At the same time, expectations for service levels are really increasing. People expect everything to be on all of the time,” Olson said.
Fletcher expressed relief that more vendors are building AI into their products.
General Tasks AIOps Can Handle for State Agencies
“The future state of AIOps is such that it will occupy a centerpiece of the IT operations platform. It is not going to be a big bang; it is going to be an evolution over time,” Olson said.
AIOps directly addresses some challenges in IT operations, including the dramatic increase in data volumes and sources, a shortfall in qualified staff and rising expectations for service levels. AIOps can handle a greater volume of data with more accuracy and precision while serving as a force multiplier for short-staffed state agencies, Gartner noted in a presentation prepared for NASCIO Midyear.
As such, AIOps can absorb a variety of responsibilities, including anomaly detection, event correlation, root cause analysis and predictive analytics. AI can make recommendations based on learned or defined responses. It can automate operation, including infrastructure provisioning, workflow, data processing and more.
Ultimately, AIOps offers the potential of great value through building a common operating picture by contextualizing large volumes of data, improving analysis and insights for service management, and augmenting existing service management and automation, Gartner notes.
State agencies face some significant challenges in the implementation of AIOps, according to Gartner’s research. The biggest obstacle to the establishment of a successful strategy for AI in IT operations is “ambiguity and hype around the term AIOps,” said Gartner’s presentation. Also, state agencies must prioritize and focus on high-value uses of AI applications. Adoption of AIOps is significantly improved by “clarity of purpose,” Olson said.
There is not one product that can unify all AI uses, and there “probably never will be,” Gartner notes, adding that administrators “require multiple, often overlapping tools and technologies” to successfully manage AIOps.
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