How agencies can harness AIOps to streamline service delivery
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2024 was a landmark year for AI, and the relentless pace of innovation will undoubtedly continue throughout 2025.
2024 was a landmark year for AI, and the relentless pace of innovation will undoubtedly continue throughout 2025.
As new AI-powered solutions flourish, federal agencies' faith in AI is growing, and agency leaders are seeking opportunities to reduce administrative burdens and improve productivity with automated tools.
One of the most promising advancements is AIOps – artificial intelligence for IT operations – because it significantly eases the pressure on federal IT teams while enhancing citizen services. When paired with unified observability platforms, AIOps helps agencies capitalize on the vast amounts of data they already collect.
Despite these valuable capabilities, IT leaders are still hesitant to embrace AIOps fully. Fortunately, agencies can easily implement AIOps and leverage its many benefits by collaborating with the right industry partners.
To maximize AIOps' potential to improve services for the American public, agencies must augment their IT operations with AIOps, pair it with unified observability solutions and prioritize strategic cross-sector collaboration.
Variety, Velocity & Analysis Challenges
In recent years, federal agencies have modernized their IT infrastructures, which has exponentially increased the variety and velocity of data they collect. With this wealth of information, it’s virtually impossible for agency IT teams to manually analyze data and extract meaningful information.
The increasing complexity of IT environments, coupled with resource and staffing constraints, exacerbates these challenges, leading to slow resolution times, high error rates and subpar citizen experiences.
Lack of coordinated help desk operations and end-to-end experience monitoring have significant financial consequences as well. In fact, a recent RAND report found that IT and software issues cost the Department of Defense at least $2.5 billion productivity in FY 2023.
To minimize productivity losses, RAND recommends automated IT performance data collection. The automation capabilities powered by AIOps can fundamentally transform IT operations, saving critical time and funding for agencies while improving their overall efficiency.
AIOps Leverages Automation to Deliver Immediate Value
AIOps uses AI and machine learning (ML) to optimize IT operations. By analyzing various IT data, the AI system detects anomalies and enables proactive issue resolution.
For resource-constrained federal agencies, AIOps' ability to proactively identify and resolve anomalies saves valuable time for IT staff. One potential use case for AIOps is help desk automation. Prioritizing, categorizing and routing help-desk tickets can be extremely time-consuming for IT personnel. With AIOps, tickets are automatically sorted and routed, helping staff address issues quickly and efficiently.
Notably, AIOps tools are only as effective as the data on which they are trained. As such, it's vital to couple these tools with unified observability solutions, which provide broad and deep IT visibility. When combined, these solutions can identify meaningful events that require the IT team's attention and offer proactive solutions.
Better Together: AIOps and Unified Observability
By combining AIOps with unified observability – an IT management approach that collects comprehensive, high-fidelity data on every transaction within an organization's digital ecosystem – agencies can take their data even further.
With the insights provided by unified observability and the analytical power of AIOps, instead of simply automating processes, the system can identify an issue’s root cause and offer a proactive solution.
For example, AIOps-powered unified observability solutions can automate incident response for user device issues by executing low-code runbooks in response to a known event such as upgrading software that is known to crash. These low-code runbooks analyze data to gather supporting evidence, build context and set priorities so IT teams can automate incident diagnosis and remediation. As a result, an otherwise highly complex troubleshooting workflow becomes an effective, accurate and swift remediation process.
Given the variety of data agencies must collect across the various IT pillars, the comprehensive insights unified observability platforms provide is vital. Unified observability solutions recognize related or redundant events by correlating the results of AIOps analysis across multiple dimensions, including time, location, users, devices, networks and applications. These insights provide critical information for the varied IT teams to collaborate efficiently, allowing them to save valuable time by resolving related incidents or outages faster. U.S. Government agencies would save $355,000 per month if they avoided just one hour of outages or slowdowns for a critical application that impacts just 10,000 workers. Over a year IT performance improvement savings can add up to huge productivity gains and improved mission outcomes.
The power of AIOps and unified observability are indisputable, and implementing the two together can deliver immediate value for government agencies.
Looking Ahead: Driving Innovation with Collaboration
Ultimately, the success of AIOps in government hinges on addressing key system constraints, streamlined processes and improved teamwork across IT pillars, as well as major programs. With these elements in place, AIOps and unified observability platforms enable high-quality digital experiences, improved morale, and more rapid innovation.
Modern automation capabilities present an exciting opportunity to streamline IT operations, reduce administrative burdens and enhance the quality of public services. When paired with unified observability, AIOps can offer actionable insights into agency data, enabling proactive issue resolution and improving overall productivity.
As we enter 2025, the transformative potential of AIOps, automation and unified observability for federal agencies is clear. Embracing modern technology and partnering with trusted industry advisors will empower agencies to optimize their IT operations and better serve the American public.
Sean Applegate is the CTO of Swish and Bill Roberts is the Deputy CTO of Defense at Riverbed.