Each month, the infrastructure and operations team writes incredible research. As a research director, I get to not only see the final outcome but all of the work and client insights that went into its creation. For those who know me, I am quick to call these out via inquiry calls — but I’d love to capture this on a more permanent platform. For 2021, I’m hoping to blog each month, highlighting a few of my favorites, and include links to the full body of work published that month. Without further ado, here’s my take on January 2021.

Since this is the first month, I get to cheat a little. I am going to feature a few reports that published in late December. My favorites both come from the ops side of the house this month:

  1. “Harness ChatOps To Empower Remote Collaboration” — Will McKeon-White and Rich Lane capture the importance of ChatOps technologies in enabling the most popular challenge of 2020: remote work. ChatOps platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Slack provide a centralized hub, visual collaboration, and preservation of knowledge by bringing people and platforms together. Companies across the globe are using ChatOps platforms to standardize work tracking, accelerate incident management, reduce context switching, automate approvals management, and coordinate continuous delivery. Will McKeon-White has dedicated much of his time in 2020 to advising clients on how to embrace ChatOps and improve virtual assistants and IT chatbots — and I’ve been lucky enough to be a fly on the wall for many of these conversations. Rich Lane works with clients on integrating these platforms into their incident management programs. Using these touchpoints, they each highlight some best practices for embracing ChatOps platforms.
  2. “Overcome Change Management Paralysis” — Charles (Charlie) Betz kicked off two extensive research streams in 2020. One sought to uncover the future IT operating model that could enable DevOps at scale — and even breaking down long-standing silos even outside of “Dev” and “Ops” (e.g., R&D, supply chain, support centers). He also fielded an extensive custom survey on the state of agile and DevOps. Each generated their own reports. For this most recent report, Charlie draws from both to discuss change management, a topic that is essential yet plaguing agile movements everywhere. This report highlights the impacts of major market shifts such as “you build it, you run it” and continuous integration/deployment as well as the ways that organizations are adapting. Some of my favorite callouts are about self-service changes, the disappearance of the change advisory board, and the continued importance of network operations centers and service desks.

Our New Cloud Research:

“Understanding The Cloud Service Provider Landscape” — maps out core competencies of the major cloud service provider categories

“Research Overview: Cloud Technology And Services” — outlines cloud categories and available Forrester Wave™ evaluations and Now Tech reports

“The State Of Cloud In Indonesia” — latest trends and adoption of cloud in Indonesia

“The Forrester Tech Tide™: Cloud Governance And Enablement Technologies, Q4 2020” — charts 14 technology categories on their maturity and business value

“Adoption Profile: Containers In North America, Q1 2021” — latest trends and adoption for containers in the US and Canada (European version coming soon)

“The Forrester Wave™: Multicloud Managed Services Providers, Q4 2020” — Forrester’s first multicloud managed services evaluation

Our New Tech Operations Research:

“Deliver Better IT Assurance With Modern Technology Operations” — executive overview of our modern technology operations (MTO) playbook

“Build The Business Case For Modern Technology Operations” — outlines the business case for various MTO investments, mapped to the Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) model

“Reshape Your Application Support For Digital Operations” — outlines the modern culture, focus, and responsibilities for application support teams for companies

“Overcome Change Management Paralysis” — summary above

“Harness ChatOps To Empower Remote Collaboration” — summary above

 

Bios and recent research for each of our cloud and tech operations analysts:

Charles Betz

Andrew Hewitt

Rich Lane

Bill Martorelli

Will McKeon-White

Tracy Woo

 

Our international analysts’ bios and research:

Charlie Dai, based in Beijing, China

Sam Higgins, based in Sydney, Australia

Guannan Lu, based in Beijing, China

Paul Miller, based in London, UK

Danny Mu, based in Beijing, China

 

Best of luck to Punxsutawney Phil on not disappointing an entire nation.