Over the last two decades the IT function has transformed from one that is primarily introverted, focused on building and managing systems that were largely internal facing, to now being the customer face of the business. Service availability used to translate to datacenter uptime. Today IT services are web and native mobile customer applications that have to be available, performant and easy to use anytime and anywhere.
Against this backdrop, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) just published the results of a survey of 300 IT and business professionals which is referenced in their recent report on Actionable Intelligence sponsored by Blazent. The survey respondents were provided with a multiple choice question about which business metrics they felt were most important to their organization. The Top 5 selections are:
- The Cost of Service Delivery. Service delivery cost is particularly high in the minds of service providers such as MSPs and System Integrators. Internal service cost appeared much lower in the list. There are many aspects to modern services that drive up external costs such as cloud service fees and high availability options, which were more controllable when peak customer loads were more predictable.
- SLA Requirements. Meeting SLA requirements for availability and performance used to be easier than it is today. With traditional applications, you could create a capacity plan, and procure the servers with room to spare, knowing you could meet the SLA for the foreseeable future. Today’s web facing applications need to provide scalability as needed with more elastic capacity and the ability to scale horizontally to meet dramatic swings in demand. Meeting performance SLA’s is much harder today. As for service availability, traditional applications could provide mutual failover across a pair of loosely coupled servers with a predictable cost. Today’s cloud applications require your service provider to maintain two full active application stacks with mirrored storage in two geographic locations, again driving the need for greater levels of oversight for the service provider.
- Revenue through IT Services. Modern organizations are constantly reviewing their service portfolio to balance investments. For me it’s really exciting to see IT organizations delivering top line contributions from their IT systems.
- Business Activity Metrics. Effective Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) requires large amounts of data to be analyzed in near real-time, with a primary focus on risk reduction. Blazent’s Data Quality Management platform ingests large parallel streams of asset and operational data, which is used to identify gaps in systems, such as the absence of mandatory security or archiving software.
- Compliance Metrics. The foundation of any governance and compliance program is to ensure adequate controls are in place to protect privacy, for example in the case of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Flagging the absence of anti-virus software on client and server software on operational systems is a basic precaution every organization dealing with confidential customer data needs to do automatically.
The key take-away from metrics that this survey uncovered is that it stresses just how much reliance organizations place on the integrity of the data used to assess service quality, profitability and risk. Blazent’s sole focus is on delivering the highest quality of data to support decision making. It’s unique data evolution process finds omissions and automates the remediation of gaps.
Learn more by downloading EMA’s Transformative Value Through Actionable Intelligence – White Paper