The BAM Blog

Occasionally I get asked a simple question by IT Operations managers, “Why do I need another monitoring tool? I’m already monitoring all my IT and network technology – what else could I need?”. And then in the next meeting an Executive will ask me “Why are we still only discovering incidents when the customer calls in a problem. Don’t we monitor this stuff ?”

Executives naturally have a world-view oriented around measuring and improving business targets such as customer satisfaction, churn, volume of new customers…etc. They’re generally not interested in megabits per second, memory leaks, or whether the CPU is working at 50% or 90%. Sometimes I hear amusing anecdotes – for example the reaction of a CEO being told that Customer Sat was down due to high loading on the Mediation server CPU.

IT Operations on the other hand live and breathe CPU Utilization, load-balancing, bandwidth, megabits per second and other dark arts. If the servers are up and the applications are responding, then there is often an implied conclusion that all is good in the world.

There is a real language barrier in most organizations between IT and Business departments, and all too often this results in real execution problems that affect customers and revenues.

A coherent monitoring strategy and implementation will play a critical role in building a bridge between these two valid but orthogonal viewpoints. Specifically the ability to monitor Business Activity in terms of key indicators (e.g. data connection set-up time, number porting delay, online ordering, automated fulfilment) extends the view of IT operations to provide assurance that technology is delivering Business Performance targets and not only technical metrics such as those described above.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) provides executives with the ability to access real-time business performance metrics. Service Activity Monitoring (SAM) is the IT department equivalent and provides Operations staff with the ability to access real-time service delivery performance metrics, and to associate the service with underlying infrastructure as well as the corresponding business process, transaction, and customer.

In other words, by using products that combine BAM and SAM capabilities, both Business and IT executives have a common viewpoint and shared language. The beginning of the end for “Lost in Translation” costly situations.

Customer Experience is definitely one of the hot topics for 2008. Against a background of intense competition and with operators generally having access to similar technical and service capabilities, it is recognised that focusing on the overall Customer Experience is critical. This places challenging demands on operators’ planning, operations and support functions – not least of which is an effective mechanism for measuring and optimizing Customer Experience. Unfortunately Customer Experience is one of those terms that can mean everything or nothing depending on who and when you ask.

Here at WestGlobal we like to think we’re pretty good at helping operators and other enterprises to measure and maximise their Customer Experience. So let’s walk the talk and define exactly what we mean when we use the term. We use the visual metaphor of the Experience Cube below to explain to customers how our solution, Vantify Experience Centre, can measure Customer Experience. It works something like this….

Starting with the first 2 dimensions (X and Y for the mathematically inclined), any interaction between a Customer and an operator can be defined in terms of the service (WAP, E-commerce, Voice, Support…) or Business Activity (provision, port, blacklist….), and the channel (e.g. IVR, Point of Sale, Call Centre) over which the service is delivered. We think that any ‘real-deal’ Customer Experience measurement solution must be able to measure any combination of service and channel. The particular orientation is generally dependent on who you talk to – Line of Business owners are typically interested in measuring their service over all channels whereas operations teams are often oriented around a particular channel e.g. Call Centre, IVR.

This two dimensional view can be considered as providing an aggregate view of Customer Experience in that key metrics or KPIs such as response time and error rate can be measured for the complete service or activity, but are not resolved down to a single customer, specifically the third or ‘Z’ axis in the Experience Cube. While we have found this aggregated view is often adequate to allow performance issues or failures to be rapidly identified and resolved, there is a reasonable argument that any solution claiming to measure Customer Experience must be able to resolve issues down to the individual customer. Vantify Experience Centre supports all three dimensions, including integration into support systems such as CRM enabling customer histories to be automatically updated with any performance issues. This allows the CRM agent to be primed for any customer calls relating to the issue, shortening the investigative part of the call, reducing support cost and improving the Customer Experience

Time is the fourth dimension in the Experience Cube. Our view is that Customer Experience measurement is a continuous activity with measurements and results presented in real-time. This provides the best opportunity to identify issues, either aggregate or per individual customer, as early as possible and eliminate or at least minimize impact on Customer Experience. Certain activities such as baselining and historical analysis can be adequately supported using historical usage data

To wrap up we’d say that Customer Experience can be defined as which service or business activity via which channel for which customer and when. If you can measure all those then you’ll have a pretty good idea of your overall Customer Experience.

The EPTS Use Case working group met on Monday in Rome before the DEBS 08 conference got underway.  It was hot stuff – temperatures touched 40C or 104F, laptops overheated, but great progress was made.  The new use case template should be available on the EPTS website in about four weeks.  After that, work should begin on trying to produce a reference architecture.  It was great to see Alex from Betfair, an end user of CEP software, with great views and great ideas.   Alex had some great ideas and great views on the benefits of CEP, and it benefits everyone to have real customers describe the value the derive, and the areas they wish to see progress.

The EPTS seems to be achieving some real momentum – no small part in thanks to the tireless Opher who pushes and organises everything behind the scene.  My thanks to Opher and to the DEBS 08 organisers for a great conference, but it reminds me that everybody has a part to play.  Those with an interest in CEP also have a responsibility to be heard and to play a part.

“Ambition should be made of sterner stuff”

Recently WestGlobal went through a rebranding exercise. We wanted to update our image to reflect our product strengths and also to find a new name for our flagship product.

Our product is built on a Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine and we present output to users via real-time dashboards (BAM), so wordplay and variations on a theme around these acronyms were bandied about with abandon.

Finally we settled on Vantify.

One of my suggestions, which I was quite pleased with in a smarty-pants way, was “roofbox”. Now you might think you know what a roofbox is, and may even have used one on your car in the past, but this word also has another meaning which is far more interesting and relevant to the topic in hand.

Here in Ireland there is a Megalithic Passage Tomb at Newgrange, Co. Meath. It is world famous and was built about 3200 BC. It is estimated that the construction of the Passage Tomb at Newgrange would have taken a work force of 300 at least 20 years.

It predates the pyramids by 500 years.

Of particular interest to us is one facet of this magnificent structure. That is, its ability to illuminate a passageway once a year on the winter solstice. To achieve this feat, an ancient device was, and still is, used to capture the rays of the sun. This device is called a roofbox.

This is defined in Wikipedia as follows:

“A roofbox is a specially contrived opening above a doorway, usually built for some astronomical significant event.”

Also interesting is the fact that the term was first coined by an Irishman:

“The term was coined by Professor Michael O’ Kelly’s during his excavation of the Newgrange passage cairn, at Brú Na Bóinne, Ireland.”

So , we at WestGlobal are not the first Irish-based community to try our hand at event processing. We are merely the latest in a very long line of innovative people who used the technology of the time in clever and lasting ways.

If we can achieve even a smidgen of the success and longevity of our illustrious forbearers at Newgrange, we think you will agree that we will have done a good job.