Production operations teams, or ops, as they’re commonly called, play a critical role: supporting and monitoring the integrated technology solutions across multi-faceted technology stack infrastructures that make customer-centric, omni-channel solutions possible.
Their work includes getting very up close and personal with tools and applications like look up utilities, preference centers, web services, real-time data update activity, batch processing, and data extracts. To ensure operational success of your technology investment, ops should:
- Work hand in hand with the developers during implementation and have a clear understanding of the applications, creating detailed production Runbooks for each solution that cover all aspects of the solution. Specific instructions and information ensure high quality support, monitoring, audits, and quality assurance.
- Utilize tools like Sterling Software to set up automated file transfers across clients and vendors. PGP encryption is used to ensure sensitive data is secure in transfer, and ops configures the environments to provide a seamless flow of data into its solutions.
- Use tools with visualization GUIs that help validate data across key load and transfer functions to identify problems prior to load into the database.
- Leverage a scheduling software such as Tidal to execute repeatable processing jobs. Solutions include quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, and jobs that execute every minute. Messages are delivered upon key points of job flows and alerts are fired when failures occur. Ops monitors the job activity, is alerted when there is a failure, and resolves any issues in a timely fashion.
- Utilize monitoring tools such as Keynote to capture performance measures and validate URL availability. Alerts are generated when availability and thresholds drop below defined levels, and ops responds to alerts and determines what action is needed based on the pre-determined thresholds.
It’s impossible to keep complex integrated technology solutions humming along without critical processes, tools, and functions established to ensure success. So next time you see someone from ops, tell them thank you for their foresight.
