The BTM Blog

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.

The evolution of enterprise monitoring has evolved greatly in recent years by focusing on the service being delivered to the Business rather than the health of the underlying IT infrastructure. We have ITIL and ISO20000 frameworks and certification to learn how to align the services to Business needs, and we also have CMDB and BSM solutions to help organize and manage our IT resources. And while these products have improved how IT delivers services and prioritizes resources, it’s only half the picture and severely limits the ability of IT Operations to detect and react to threats. So while IT has better tools to organize management of IT infrastructure resources, IT Operations is still a stressful place where most problems are still reported by users.

An analogy that’s often used is monitoring the human body. If you monitor the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the human body, you probably end up a list such as heart rate, respiration, and temperature. You may even try to develop a more holistic approach by not only monitoring each KPI, but also monitoring the relationship between each KPI. Therefore if you see an increase in the heart rate, you also expect to see a corresponding increase in body temperature and respiration. And if you see such an increase, you might infer that the body is exercising – perhaps riding a bicycle.

To me, this represents a problem. Sure, the body may be biking, but is it going in the right direction?

Applying this same technique to IT system management is inaccurate and results in many business problems remaining undetected. It is just not possible to qualitatively monitor business activities from infrastructure data.

But a complete 360° view is possible. By monitoring the myriad interactions and units of work that make up the business transactions and activities, the IT organization now provides a business context for the work that the infrastructure is carrying out. We use Service Activity Monitoring (SAM) to qualitatively monitor the units of work, and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) to qualitatively monitor the desired Business Activity or transaction. By looking qualitatively at Service Delivery from Top Down as well as Bottom Up, an IT organization can control all aspects of Service Delivery with all the benefits such as lower costs, higher revenues, and happier customers.

Note: In my previous musings, Doug McClure kindly pointed me to his excellent blog, and mentioned that he hadn’t heard of “Service Activity Monitoring” (SAM) before. It’s a term I used after I first came across it from a presentation given by CITT online describing an architecture overview in Deutsche Post. Essentially, SAM sits between BAM and infrastructure monitoring and monitors how services from applications are being delivered as units of work within a business process.

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.

There’s some ongoing discussions in blogland as a result of a recent blog posting here by my good friend Tim Bass.  In his post, he applauds the use of analytics to the point of damning the current crop of CEP vendors for being made up of companies that don’t “support or advocate advanced analytics”.

Opher responded here by saying that most of today’s CEP problems do not require advanced analytics, and used the metaphor of blind men feeling an elephant.

For me, I confess that I fail to understand the debate.  I’m curious as to the term “analytics”.  Just what is “Advanced Analytics” as applied to CEP?  Is it advanced situation detection – in other words, will I use advanced analytical techniques to detect a situation?  Or is it advanced visualisation – will I be able to produce a real-time updating graph or chart based on a series of complex mathematical calculations?

Here at WestGlobal, we tend to focus on detecting whatever situations need to be detected, in the lowest latency required.  We can use a variety of techniques, depending on the situation.  We might find that one situation may be detected with a series of very simple rules, but that another requires enrichment from a data source, while joining with a variety of other data streams, and a dependency on the occurance of a series of other situations within the past 2 minutes.  But is this advanced analytics? 

For me, analytics is not a requirement – at most it’s an implementation detail for a specific problem.  As Tim points out, there are probably many examples of event processing that require very sophisticated processing techniques (I’m avoiding the term analytics).  As Opher points out, most applications today don’t require it.  And I’d like to point out, if the requirement existed and someone could make lots of $$ doing it, then chances are there’s somebody doing it already (and they’re keeping it a secret for as long as they can).

I’d love for Tim (or anyone else) to post an example or two of specific problems that exist that require advanced analytics.  Otherwise, it may be that I, and many other people, conclude that the trumpeting of the requirement of advanced analytics is just another type of snake oil.

Next week, I’m attending the DEBS 2008 conference in Rome. The conference is a great occasion for people from the academic and industrial worlds to mix and share ideas. Unfortunately, I’ll be cutting my attendance short due to customer commitments, but I am looking forward to seeing how event processing is maturing as a technology on many fronts. The DEBS conference pushes large scale considerations to the fore, and focuses less on the minutiae of implementation such as event processing languages or correlation techniques. Instead, discussions will tend to focus on the distributed aspect of event processing, with issues such as security, availability and reliability, volumes, filtering, event ordering, and synchronization all being presented. And I’m especially looking forward to the software demonstrations.