It’s a really big step to elevate raw data to a form that can claim to improve business outcomes. Fortunately, with appropriate degree of manipulation, aggregation and context, data can be transformed into the foundation of sound business decision making.
In the blog titled The Five Step Process for Fixing Five Service Level Management Failures, I describe a Data Quality Management (DQM) approach to create context. The chart below shows the findings of a recent research study commissioned by Blazent into DQM, highlighting the areas of greatest need, which span IT Operational and broader business requirements:
In this article I want to focus on the needs of three consumers of the insight that this contextualized data provides; Operations, Finance and Infrastructure functions:
IT Operations
IT Operations Management (ITOM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) gather infrastructure data from console logs, event logs and monitoring tools. This data needs to be refined and analyzed before it can be used for decision making.
DQM provides this refinement, eliminates noise in the form of redundant data to accelerate troubleshooting and provide historical views to make trends evident. Speaking of historical views, I remember when I was a mainframe System Programmer at British Telecom, one of my many housekeeping tasks was storage management. Every day, I ran an automated job to scan all our disk surfaces for errors. It was rare to encounter a hard failure, but soft (or recoverable) failures were common. I wrote reports on the soft error rates in SAS, which showed the growth of errors by device. With this insightful information I could see many days out, that a device was going to fail. Usually our mainframes called-home, and scheduled preventive maintenance before I had a chance to. This is just one reason I call mainframe legendary rather than legacy.
Finance
Finance covers a broad spectrum of functions, including Technology Business Management (TBM), IT Financial Management, Purchasing, Budgeting, Contracting and Compliance. Financial departments need accurate and complete IT data to more accurately and quickly assess and prioritize budgetary and compliance related initiatives. One of Blazent’s more progressive Financial Services customers extended their Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to record their Managed Service Provider’s (MSP) contract reference so they can match bills to the assets under management. This form of billing transparency fosters trustful relationships between outsourcing companies and their clients.
IT Infrastructure
IT Infrastructure often encompasses IT Asset Management (ITAM) and License Compliance, Change Management, Service Analysis, Security, executing project roll-outs and Service Mapping functions. The Infrastructure group insures IT Governance controls are in place to reduce the risk of penalties from vendors for license compliance violations, and being prepared for internal and external audits. I once worked with a European broadcast network who had finance analysts scrambling for nearly two weeks to validate all their installed licenses to preparation for an Oracle audit. Blazent’s DQM solution ensures the CMDB maintains a full inventory of installed licenses to identify potential compliance vulnerabilities. We found an average drop in compliance risk of 14% across 40 uses of Blazent by our MSP partners.
The more regulated an industry is, the more audit types they need to worry about. Banks for example have to maintain privacy for Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance, treasury audits, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and more.
All the above departments have the opportunity to consolidate their data into a single database (typically a CMDB), so they can focus their DQM efforts on a single system-of-record. Organizations are increasingly employing more advanced analytics which is the subject of a recent 451 Research study. Below is a chart from the upcoming webinar discussing the findings that shows the business value of the data IT manages:
The full report can be downloaded at this link. You can view the recorded webinar discussing the findings here.