Franco Susi Makes IT Operations Forgettable

For Franco Susi, an IT operations leader at Booz Allen, the mark of true success in his field is when no one knows you exist. “Back-end IT ops is traditionally something that’s kind of behind the scenes,” he explains. “Nobody thinks or talks about you unless it isn’t working.” So, when it’s performed with the high levels of excellence that Booz Allen is known for, clients have so little reason to think about it that they could practically forget the work is being done at all. “It’s kind of like plugging your appliance into an electrical outlet. No one thinks of the processes it takes to make that work, they just expect the power to always be on,” says Franco. 

We recently had the opportunity to talk to Franco and gain some perspective from his more than 20 years of experience in IT operations. Read to learn more of his thoughts on the industry, where it is headed, and why automation and AI are emerging as some of the field’s most valuable tools. 

First, do no harm. From Day One, we want to ensure we do no harm to the work and mission outcomes already in play. When we are starting a new project, I ask my staff to look at everything with a fresh set of eyes. This can offer valuable insights and perspectives that might otherwise be overlooked and can help to determine where we can improve the process or automate. As part of this, I challenge every team member to come up with improvements and/or automations that would make the process faster and more efficient, ensuring there are proper standards in place to support scalability. If we can engineer an automated solution that increases efficiency to the point an agency doesn't need us to support that process anymore, then we are successful.

It's when no one knows you exist because everything just works. Back-end IT ops is traditionally something that's kind of behind the scenes—nobody thinks about or talks about unless it isn’t working, at which point you have every spotlight shining directly on you. A common measure of success is something our customers call “averted outages,” or the number of outages prevented due to monitoring and capturing the issue before it impacts customers. The true measure of successful back-end IT ops is 100% availability. That is not always realistic, but that is always the goal we are striving for and is helped by moving from a reactive to a proactive IT ops posture.

Reactive to proactive means agencies avoid failures and maintain high levels of availability, thereby delivering “always on” systems for the end customer. It’s essentially moving from reacting to an IT issue after it has caused downtime to preventing it in the first place. An emerging tool that can help agencies move to a more proactive stance is AI for IT ops. AI for IT ops can help by analyzing massive amounts of data and detecting trends and patterns, so teams can proactively address maintenance, avoid potential problems, and ultimately reduce downtime by predicting and identifying issues before they become incidents. 

AI can fundamentally enhance how organizations execute IT operations by providing intelligent automations. Intelligent automation improves infrastructure management by generating insights into resource allocation, capacity planning, workload optimization, and error resolution. This enhanced visibility increases situational awareness by predicting and mitigating bottlenecks or failures and accelerating troubleshooting. AI ops can be leveraged to process large volumes of information in timeframes not achievable by humans—for example, triaging large numbers of alerts that come in from various systems to triangulate issues that will lead to much larger impacts. AI ops can help with the scale factor for large enterprises and lead to faster response time to customers by automating routine processes/requests as well as greater availability of systems through quicker reactions to issues/alerts.