Inside Huawei: How We Optimized Our IT Management

Enterprise management has always struggled with how to optimize and oversee IT resources, tasks, and operations, a challenge that’s becoming more complex with digital disruption. As a result, less tech-savvy companies are more likely to fall behind the competition and remain unable to attract top talent.

Most of the time, it is not so much that managers do not see the dangers of digital disruption coming. They understand the challenges as well as the opportunities, and they know the competition sees them as well. Unfortunately, top management decisions often tend to focus on who is responsible for IT and where IT should be located, rather than on the how.

Generally, the assumption is that the right people will do the right work, either internally or in another company. However, that assumption is flawed. It’s important to be reminded that digital transformation is more about how companies do things and less about who or where those tasks are performed.

Read more: So, What Does “Digital Transformation” Really Mean?

Digital disruption changes entire industries so fast that companies lack a structured process or the capabilities to handle it. IT management should offer not only the resources (people and equipment) to do the job, but also the processes and capabilities to eliminate risks, tackle the problems, and open up opportunities. Most enterprises need to envision a new approach to IT management.

In this post, I offer managers and IT departments a framework and some suggestions to help them consider the action their organization needs to take to move ahead with confidence

Create synergy in management: Cultivate a working environment without silos by bringing together business and IT leaders. Traditional IT management is often detached from business management, the focus of which is on goals and objectives that relate to the company’s revenue or profit. On the other hand, IT management is responsible for the technology platform that sustains the entire organization. Only when IT departments work together with business managers to define a strategy and a procedure can the business thrive.

Embrace a digital workplace strategy: Provide efficient services for your business in a heterogeneous IT environment by adopting an elastic and customized Cloud structure for your business.

Take advantage of IT tools: Deploy new tools to provide an outstanding user experience for a large number of IT users. IT tools can boost productivity and unlock numerous benefits.

Here’s What We Did

Designed and developed in-house by Huawei, IMOC (Intelligent Maintenance and Operation Center) accelerates the digital transformation of enterprises. IMOC secures the customer experience while meeting demands for IT operational efficiency and rapid service provisioning. On the road to digital transformation, Huawei has encountered the same challenges as other enterprises and based on these experiences, developed four core capabilities that underpin IT management:

• IT self-support
• Automated Operations & Maintenance (O&M)
• Advanced operations visualization
• IT architecture standardization

These four components are linked to the major final benefits of digital transformation: safety, stability, agility, cost transparency, and efficiency.

IMOC is based on Huawei’s years of internal IT experience and best practices. It enables the four main capabilities that we believe underpin the digital transformation of enterprise IT management. The IMOC platform makes a complex IT environment easy to operate by integrating O&M at all levels of the four capabilities:

• Improves service efficiency through self-support. Based on iCloud’s management engine, IMOC can manage cloud platform resources from different vendors. It also realizes the collaborative management of private and public cloud resources, providing users with self-support and efficient services.
• Automates O&M to deliver rapid response. The automation ability of IMOC solidifies O&M expertise into rules, saving cost and personnel time.
• Simplifies operations with advanced visualization. IMOC covers key areas like infrastructure, network, cloud resources, application products, and user services. Visual operation provides an interface through which it identifies risks and problems, measures results, and makes predictions.

The IT operation model has changed from blind to visible, from extensive to precise, from passive to active, making it easy to operate, improve efficiency, optimize experience, and save costs.

Read more about Huawei’s digital way of working in this article: Inside Huawei: Our Digital Work Practices.

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.