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Operations Analysis

The company migrated its image hosting and distribution from a physical collocation facility to a cloud-based infrastructure using Amazon Web Services (AWS) (aws.amazon.com, 2018).  The move solved the company's image system's scalability, performance, and disaster recovery challenges and eliminated the worry about cache flushes or capacity and bandwidth issues (aws.amazon.com, 2018). Furthermore, it provided a better experience for prospective home buyers and renters, real estate agents and other site visitors (aws.amazon.com, 2018).

 

With the current cloud-based infrastructure, the company was able to add the new services quickly - the virtual assistant application and the call center application for the Premier Agent Assist service.  The operations team was able to spin-up new compute engine and storage to provide the development team the platform to build the new applications. Furthermore, it accelerated the time to market for these new services.  However, with the speed and the agility that the cloud provided, the operations and maintenance of the infrastructure changed the paradigm of managing such environment. The operations team had to re-evaluate its policies and governance to adapt to the new technology using the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework.  The company prefers to continue with the ITIL's systematic approach to IT service management because of the benefits it provides. It helps the company to manage risk, strengthen customer relations, establish cost-effective practices and build a stable IT environment that allows for growth, scale and change (Greiner & White, 2017).

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The operations team currently uses the following process to manage its cloud infrastructure and Services:

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  • Request Management.  Order cloud services using the AWS service catalog portal (Bond, 2015). Supported by Cloud/Enterprise Architect, Cloud Engineer and Director of IT.

  • Incident Management. Monitor event logs within the cloud services portal (Bond, 2015).  Supported by the Security Operations Team.

  • Change Management. Compute, Storage, Identity and Access Management, Load Balancers, Network Configurations and Caching services (Bond, 2015). Supported by Cloud/Enterprise Architect, Cloud Engineer, Level 1 and 2 Operations Team.

  • Configuration Management. Compute, Storage, Identity and Access Management, Load Balancers, Network Configurations and caching services (Bond, 2015).  Supported by Cloud/Enterprise Architect, Cloud Engineer, Level 1/2 Operations Team.

  • IT Asset Management. Using AWS portal service to keep track of the infrastructure. Supported by the Operations Team.

  • Service Desk Function.  Services provided by Level 1/2 operations team.

  • Service Level Management.  Service Level Agreements tracked by the Operations team.

  • Availability Management.  Service availability monitored by the operations team.

  • Capacity Management. Monitored by the operations team.

  • IT Service Continuity.  Monitored by the operations team.

  • Financial Management. Managed by the director of IT.

  • Security Management.  Managed by the Security Operations Team.  Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) leads in creating the security policies and governance.

  • Technical Support. Level 1/2 Operations team provide support for Virtual Assistant issues and Premier Agent Assist associates

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FIVE YEAR PLAN

YEAR 1 PLAN:  AUTOMATED FAULT MANAGEMENT

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Develop a solution for automated fault management for proactive and predictive service monitoring.  Provide the operations team to remediate issues before it affects any services.

YEAR 2 PLAN:  AUTOMATE PROVISIONING AND DEPLOYMENT

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Develop a solution to automate provisioning and deployment of cloud infrastructure to support new services.  Reduce deployment errors and accelerate service activation.

YEAR 3 PLAN:  IMPROVE SECURITY MANAGEMENT​

 

Develop or acquire a security analytics platform for proactive monitoring of the system.  The platform should be able to ingest all types of data and provide log correlations for any security anomalies.

YEAR 4 PLAN:  SERVICE CATALOG PORTAL​

 

Develop a service catalog portal for Premier Agent Assist subscribers.  Allow subscribers to request assistance and service changes.

YEAR 5 PLAN:  IMPROVE POLICY-BASED CONTROL

 

Increase standardization and governance of the infrastructure.

FIVE YEAR PLAN - CLOUD SERVICE ORIENTED TEAM MODEL

The goal of the five-year plan is to continue to shift the culture of the operations team from operational-focused to a service-driven organization. The IT organization must become internal service providers supplying business-enabling solutions that drive innovation and deliver value (Lees, 2017). Figure 9 below illustrates the high-level model of Cloud Service Oriented Team.

Figure 9: Cloud Service Oriented Team Model.  Source: Lees, 2017

OPERATING EFFICIENCY - DATA TABLE

The company's operating expenses are growing at a yearly average rate of 55%. For 2017, the total operating expense was $1,255M (zillow.com, 2018).  If the new operating model provides the efficiency, scalability, and agility that it promises, the company could save at a range of 1% to 10%. Table 2 illustrates the data table of a possible decrease in operating expenses given that the expenditures are growing at a conservative rate of 10%, 11%, 12%, 13%, and 14% for years 2019 through 2023 respectively.

Table 2: Operational Efficiency - Savings in operation expenses

TOTAL QUALITY CONTROL (TQC)

With the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure, the company has also embraced the Continuous Delivery (CD) Model, Configuration management (CM) and Container technology for developing their application.  Continuous Delivery provided the application development team a model to automate build, increase quality and improve repeatability (Ensor, 2018). CD added a consistent and predictable model for delivery of high-quality versioned artifacts (Ensor, 2018).  Configuration Management added a degree of repeatable automation via code, for both the infrastructure and software (Ensor, 2018).  Public clouds provided an environment fostering innovative software build tools that take advantage of an almost inexhaustible set of resources (Ensor, 2018). Containers provided the last major innovation decoupling build artifacts from their accompanying servers (Ensor, 2018). Figure 10 illustrates the capability that the application development team selected to ensure quality control for their software development lifecycle. Furthermore, the application development team utilize the high-level architecture shown in Figure 11 to develop, test and deploy their application.  It is a new practice that the team is currently following when developing a new service and will continue to use in the future. The transition to AWS has enabled the company to innovate faster and gain business agility to offer new services quickly.

Figure 10: SDLC Capability. Source: Ensor, 2018

Figure 11: Application Development Team High-Level Architecture Model. Source: Miller, 2014

DECISION ANALYSIS

The Sales and Pricing strategy presented in this proposal gives the company the potential to increase top-line growth with the two new offerings for Real Estate Agents - Virtual Assistant and Premier Agent Assist.  Furthermore, these services would serve as a conduit to boost advertisement sales if the Agents are successful in converting ads leads to clients.  It is a win-win scenario for both the company and the Agents. Figure 12 illustrates the decision tree analysis representing the possible Expected Monetary Value (EMV) of $193M.  The decision tree used the 78% probability of success based on the Monte Carlo simulation within the company's sales strategy - equates to the upper range of $440M.  The 22% percent in the equation represents the chance of the program failing equaling to $150M which is the company's initial investment.  The analysis resulted in $193M which represents only 10% of the current total subscribers.  This additional revenue will return the company's initial investment in the first year of the program launch.

Figure 12: Decision Tree Analysis - New Services Introduction

SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS

New Program Guidelines

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  • Target 10% of total current subscribers (8914)

  • Hire Premier Agent Assist employees at 1% of total subscribers - maximum of 891

  • Offer three months free services for trial

Virtual Assistant

Premier Agent Assist

Invest in New Services

Focus on Continental 

United States

International Expansion is risky

Cloud-based Infrastructure

Invest in proactive and predictive security management

Executive Sponsorship to transform operations team from operational-focused to service-oriented

Automate Extensively - Provisioning, Deployment and Fault Management

Improve Policy-Based control for operational efficiency

Embrace Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Model (CI/CD), Configuration Management (CM), and Container Techology

faster application development

faster time to market and

business agility.

RECOMMENDATION BENEFITS:

Increase in Top-Line Revenue from new service offerings

Incremental Advertisements business 

Operational Efficiency - Reduce operational expense through extensive automation in operation and maintenance

Business Agility through Agile Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)

Business Continuity and Scalability through cloud-based infrastructure and technology

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