Tag Archive | "Measuring"

Supply Chain Analytics Just Getting Started

Tags: Analytics, BSM, Business Service Management, Enterprise IT, Measuring, Supply Chain


When you think about things you can measure inside the organization whether that’s from a Business Service Management perspective or other general business measuring such as Business Intelligence (BI) or web analytics, one thing you probably don’t rattle off the top of your head is “supply chain analytics.”But as Mary Jander points out on Internet Evolution, the ability to measure what’s happening in the supply chain could have tremendous value to organizations and in some ways would represent a business measurement holy grail.

A TechTarget’s SearchManufacturing.erp.com article suggests that this technology has actually been around for more than a decade, but it’s only beginning to come together now.

But as Jander indicates in her post, it’s still a vague category, which some business people don’t even acknowledge as a legitimate analytics category of its own. Regardless of what people may call it or where they place it in the business analytics space, according to Richard Sherman, director of North America for the Supply Chain Council, as quoted in Jander’s post, only 15 percent of companies are doing this kind measuring in spite of its high perceived value.

That could be because of a lack of mature tools just yet to handle this and that means IT pros have to be involved to crunch the numbers and generate meaningful reports. Yet from an inventory tracking perspective alone, it seems to be a worthwhile goal for companies to pursue.

Whatever the reason for its lack of traction yet, it could be something your company may want to start exploring because if you can understand the supply chain at detail level, it could give you one more way giving your business an advantage in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Photo by Nick Saltmarsh on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.

The Essential Metrics For Infrastructure And Operations – Forrester

Tags: Business Alignment, Business Service Management, Forrester, IT Management, Measuring, Metrics, Performance


The Hub Commentary_

I tend to agree with Rachel, there is no secret set of standard metrics.  There are methods and classifications for services, but no one size fits all.  I will also add that measurements drive behavior as well and that I would offer caution in over measuring.

For instance, if the service desk gets measured for number of tickets completed, they tend to cherry pick and submit every conversation to garner more points.  Counting time for application groups turns each non-developing task into something that requires planning.  All of this again leads to measuring IT and technology rather than the services driving the business.

As we’ve discussed in many articles and as Rachel too points out, it’s more about the value, action and method of measuring services and performance than technology metrics.

How are you measuring your IT – technology or services?

Michele

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ne thing that I’ve found in common across infrastructure and operations groups of all shapes and sizes is that they are continually searching for the ideal set of key performance indicators. A set of metrics that perfectly measures their infrastructure, demonstrates the excellence of their operations, but are still simple and cheap to collect.  (Read Full Article…)

Is Business Service Management ready for the cloud?

Tags: BSM, Business Service Management, Cloud, IT Management Tools, Managing, Measuring, Virtualization


This is not the first article about Business Service Management and cloud computing, and it will certainly not be the last. The one thing I’ve learned about the cloud, both private and public, is that this is new technology, and it is constantly changing. Companies setting up private clouds are adopting different technologies to make their lives easier, while public cloud providers are updating their products and APIs on a regular basis to improve and accelerate the transition. This leads to an exciting, dynamic environment that causes more challenges when implementing a BSM solution…or does it?

How exactly should BSM work with the cloud? Once cloud resources are incorporated into a company’s IT infrastructure, there needs to be a way to tie these virtual/cloud resources into the company’s business service views. Then the health of the business services will reflect all of the IT resources. And voila, problem solved. Now, I have been told I sometimes over simplify things, but when it comes to BSM, I don’t think people should look at “the cloud” as some complex, unknown entity. The cloud should simply provide another data source to be incorporated into a business service view.

BSM is only as powerful as its underlying integrations. How can one look at the availability of a service or the root cause of a service breach unless these metrics are driven by ALL of the underlying IT resources that make up this service? The resources in the cloud should not be treated as different, special data sources. Cloud resources need to be integrated with all of the existing underlying technology that drives the business service. Given how fast cloud computing technology is growing and changing, this will force BSM products to continue to create and enhance their underlying integrations. Of course, this is nothing new for BSM vendors, or any software vendors who integrate to third party software.

The cloud will continue to bring change to BSM, and BSM products will need to grow and evolve along with the cloud technology. But since BSM is based on underlying integrations, BSM is ready to go “to the cloud”.

How is the Cloud Changing the Way We Measure IT Services?

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, IT Management Tools, Measuring, Virtualization


Business Service Management can provide a single pane of glass across any environment:  public/private cloud, virtual and physical – How important will this be as we move to the cloud?

I heard a great quote a couple of months ago: “Every company in the IT industry with revenue of less than $100m is currently changing their strategy to focus on the cloud.” If you combine that assertion with the fact that every company in the IT industry with revenues over $1 billion is modifying their strategy to make it “cloud-enabled” or “cloud-ready”, it becomes difficult to support the naysayers who are claiming that the cloud is just a fad. It’s here to stay whether or not you want to accept it.

So the question for this audience becomes “What does that mean for Business Service Management?” From my experience with a very large service provider who is aggressively moving into the public/private cloud space for their internal operations as well as their external customers, Business Service Management becomes a necessity instead of a nice to have. Adoption of the cloud exacerbates the technical challenges that spawned the BSM industry in the first place: namely IT heterogeneity, physically/geographically dispersed data centers and the need for IT organizations to provide higher levels of service at lower costs. At the most simple level, the ability to co-locate two virtual machines on one physical server cuts costs in half. However, this cost savings brings along complexities in terms of resource sharing, how the virtual machines got provisioned to the box, how they are being independently and jointly monitored and how they will be managed moving forward. Additionally, cloud adoption may very well increase the number of systems management tools that an IT organization needs to deploy, manage and monitor.

The ability to provide IT operations and management a single pane of glass view into all of these complexities, focused on the most critical business services, becomes necessary to ensure that the costs of these complexities do not overcome the costs savings enjoyed through virtualization.

How are you measuring your services in the cloud?

Kevin