The BAM Blog

A partner of ours returned from a meeting recently with the reaction from the prospect of “I already monitor my systems, why do I need more monitoring?“.  Great question.

I get that a lot. It’s a normal reaction. Usually from the IT Operations Director who has spent considerable sums of money on monitoring to date, and can boast an arsenal including:

• Hardware monitoring
• Application availability
• Network monitoring
• Website monitoring
• Transaction monitoring
• Speciality tools for monitoring Oracle, SAP and the like
• And perhaps some dashboard aggregators that consolidate information from many separate sources into one single dashboard.

So why would an organization need more monitoring?  Well, the single most compelling reason is to cut down on the number of outages and incidents that impact business performance.  To do this, there’s more to monitoring than just detecting when things go wrong which is what the products in use by most organizations are stuck with.  By then, the damage is done, and something has already gone wrong.

Ideally, monitoring should be smart enough, and powerful enough, to detect a situation that indicates with a high probability that something needs attention before the situation develops into something bigger and more costly.  It’s the equivalent of warning you that your car is about to be towed instead of telling you that your car has just been towed.

In other words, rather than coping with IT disasters, what about averting them in the first place?  A system that constantly monitors your key business activities and transactions, with the ability to connect events together in order to detect variances within your business transactions.  Tells you exactly what’s going on in real-time and provides timely warnings.

For example, your current monitoring systems for processing orders might provide the following information:

1. Database server OK, ping round trip 0.112s
2. Database OK, 32 transactions per second, average transaction 1.232s
3. Web Server OK, 42 connections

Whereas a system monitoring business events would instead report:

1. 14 Orders in progress
2. Average time to process orders is 6.687 seconds
3. Alert: 13% of orders processed in last 5 minutes were above 9 seconds.  Current trend is that an order will breach the SLA of 12.5 seconds within 40 minutes.

So rather than overworked IT staff trying to filter millions of seemingly disconnected IT events, most of which report little or nothing by way of business significance, they can instead focus on meaningful business objectives and performance indicators, and can react quicker to events that impact business performance, as well as communicate with non-IT staff using the lingua franca of your business.  And most importantly, if you’re already solely relying on traditional monitoring approaches, then you can expect to significantly further reduce the number of outages and incidents from anywhere between 20% and 80%!

I was recently giving a presentation to a rather large utility provider, and was asked the question “But why do I need real-time?”

Good question.  And a very difficult question to answer correctly in most cases.  There’s lots of answers that address the requirement – in theory.  Take your pick from the ones I come across most often, and may even be guilty of uttering one or two of these myself:

• React to an opportunity or threat
• Become more proactive
• Prioritize resources
• Make smarter decisions quicker

But sometimes the right answer lies in asking a question in return.  “Is there anything you could do if you knew something had just occurred?“  This turns the question around to the customer and they always find that there is always something that can be done to improve the situation!

Within a business context, knowing immediately if there are problems means that you know at least as soon as your customers do.  A well known analyst firm estimates that more than 60% of problems are reported by customers (and in our experience, this number is low.  We generally see numbers approaching 80%)  But the value of detection is completely lost if there isn’t a plan for reacting.

So one definition of real-time is defined or determined by the window of time that exists whereby a detection and reaction have maximum benefit.  So whether you need to react within 5 minutes, or 5 micro-seconds,  each situation has it’s own context and definition of real-time.

Ask The Brian

But the real value of detection is predicting situations in advance by being able to detect the patterns that indicate a high probability of something about to happen in the future.  This is possible so long as situations exhibit a consistent set of early-warning signs – to the uninitiated it can seem a little bit like High tech fortune telling.  But the results are definitely worth it.  We’ve seen results in our customers showing more than an 80% drop in customer detection rates and incidents tagged as high priority.  It’s where we definitely see the value of Complex Event Processing and Business Activitiy Monitoring intersecting.

Many vendors use variations of the concept of enabling an enterprise to “Align IT with the Business”. For example, products to help to manage IT from the perspective of the Business and to do more of what drives the business and less of what doesn’t. Or to view your IT as an engine for business value. These are valuable perspectives, and Business Service Management (BSM) is being promoted as the answer. Here at WestGlobal, we believe that BSM is only half the picture.

Let’s ask an important question:

Q. What does the business want from aligning IT with the business?

A. The business wants a clear and simple solution that monitors how well IT services are being delivered to support business activities and transactions. The business also wants quantitative and qualitative data in order to understand how well individual services are performing, and would like the IT department to prioritize their Operational activity to maximize business activities and minimize negative business impacts.

In order to deliver this vision, there are two different aspects that need to be addressed.

The first part concerns IT resources. Servers, networks, routers, websites – all of the technology and resources and tools that are used to deliver services. Monitoring solutions are required to check the health and availability of these components. Enterprise monitoring tools are vital in this regard, and they’re readily available and do a good job.

The second part concerns Business Activities. Sales orders, shipping, payments – all of the vital business transactions and processes that rely on IT infrastructure that are the life blood of any business.

Traditionally, enterprises are very good at addressing the first part – it is well understood and products are available. On the other hand, very few properly address the second. Without the second part, an enterprise will not be able to align the business and IT departments. Instead of measuring how well sales orders are being processed, the IT department only has lower level tools to measure server uptime or CPU load. Reporting a monthly statistic that the web servers were available within their SLA of 98% does nothing to assure the business that all orders were captured and that every customer had a satisfactory experience. It’s why enterprises that only address the first part still rely on their customers to report problems first.

Addressing the second part means adopting a different approach to gathering data for measuring service delivery. Event processing is an ideal underlying technology to extract relevant and meaningful data from the thousands of events that occur every hour in the enterprise. In terms of Business Activity Monitoring, an event is simply the fact that a process or transaction or activity has progressed. For example, an event may signify that a customer has logged in. A subsequent event may signify that a customer has queried stock availability or placed an item in a basket, and so on until the individual transaction has completed. Because most business activities can be broken up into a start and end, with varying numbers of units of work in between, figuring out the significance of each event is straightforward. By measuring how long it takes for each unit of work, and by tracking events that relate to different activities, the IT department can report to the business in terms that are meaningful.

Enterprise Monitoring Systems with Business Service Management (BSM) do a great job with the first part. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) that is capable of monitoring Service experience and Customer experience does a great job on the second part, and together enables IT and Business alignment.

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.