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Transformational Values—Metrics, KPIs, Visibility, and Insights

Data is by itself only useful insofar as it can provide visibility and insights anchored in relevant and meaningful metrics. So EMA looked closely at metrics from multiple perspectives in its research on digital and IT transformation. Figure 4 is just one example of metric priorities—in this case operationally driven. It shows that time to provision new services, security-related issues, change-related data, and incident and problem data were at the top of the charts, although perhaps the most significant insight is that virtually all metric categories were fairly important and reasonably close in ranking.

In looking at other metric categories, we saw that internal costs for delivering IT services was the most pervasive financial metric and that business process efficiency impacts led in business metrics for pervasiveness, with improved efficiencies in dealing with partners, suppliers, and service providers as the most critical business metric category when respondents were asked to choose their top priority.

The importance of data accuracy in establishing metrics was highlighted by an interview with a North American financial services configuration management system (CMS) deployment:

“We have linked a set of metrics to each one of the processes, but most of them right now are targeted at growing the system and looking at data accuracy. Soon we’ll be able to also measure how successful we are in minimizing unauthorized changes and other efficiency and value-related metrics. It’s a phased deployment, a phased rollout, so the metrics will have to evolve and grow along with the broader initiative.”

EMA has documented Blazent’s impact in providing visibility and insights across a wide variety of metric categories. Two groups are presented below as examples:

Change and impact values

  • More detailed and reliable insights for DevOps, agile, and accelerated application creation, provisioning, and deployment
  • More detailed and reliable insights for service availability and performance by minimizing or eliminating non-disruptive changes
  • More detailed and reliable insights in support of improved disaster recovery

Asset values

  • Metrics that make a difference—improved IT credibility with lines of business when IT assets are charged or accounted for more accurately
  • Overall improved IT efficiencies in planning and managing services due to improved insight into “what’s out there,” “what it costs,” and “how it can be used”
  • Improved billing resulting in savings for service providers and their clients leveraging IT assets

In term of obstacles, inaccurate or incomplete data was tied for second place with ineffective IT leadership among IT stakeholders. The leading obstacle proved to be organizational and political issues overall.

When we looked at success characteristics across the entire questionnaire—comparing the “extremely successful” in both digital and IT transformation with “very successful,” “successful in some areas but not in others,” and “only somewhat successful”—the data showed what we believe are some meaningful patterns suggesting a prescriptive approach.

Stakeholder drivers – The most successful were those respondents who claimed a 50/50 partnership between IT and business stakeholders in driving their transformational initiatives. This underscores the need for what might be called the “digital dialog”—a shared interest and involvement between IT and the business.

Best practices – 97% of the “extremely successful” experienced benefits from best practices, in contrast to only 63% of those who were only “somewhat successful.”

Technology (general) – Those respondents who were “extremely successful” were more likely to view technology as a “driver” and had significantly higher adoption rates of technologies overall. This was a consistent pattern based on levels of success, with “extremely successful” averaging six technologies affiliated with their initiative compared to 4.7 for the “very successful,” 4.3 for those “successful in some areas but not in others,” and 3.7 for those “only somewhat successful.”

Technology (specifics) – Two of the technologies for which uptake was most dramatically different between the “extremely successful” and the other groups were data quality management and CMDB/ CMS/ADDM. The two other most differentiated technologies were application performance management and social media for improved communication.

Metrics for transformational success – This same pattern of more is better also applied to questions regarding transformational success for operational metrics, financial metrics, and business metrics. As an example, “extremely successful” respondents had, on average, 4 business metrics compared to 3.3 for the “very successful,” 3 for those who were “successful in some places but not others,” and only 2 for those who were “only somewhat successful.”

EMA Perspective

Perhaps the single thing that stands out from this research is the need for better dialog, communication, and shared processes across IT and between IT and business stakeholders. However, the next salient observation would have to be that this dialog, along with the enhanced processes that set the stage for improved levels of automation and efficiency, depends on a solid data-driven foundation. And this means not only bringing data together from many different sources, but also ensuring that this data is of the highest quality in order to break through the siloed walls that still fragment IT today and fracture its effectiveness.

From conversations with Blazent customers, EMA can safely say that Blazent offers:

  • Industry-leading data assimilation and data-quality management
  • Unique and industry-leading support for toolset evaluation, including toolset coverage as well as toolset discovery and supported KPIs
  • Unique insights on change management, asset and inventory management, performance management, and performance-related interdependencies
  • Enhanced visibility to support governance and audit requirements
  • Integrated data assimilation to deliver an effective “source of actionable intelligence” and automate CMDB/CMS currency, accuracy, and efficiency

Beyond all this, the good news is that Blazent is evolving in the direction of advanced analytics for IT— to make the very most of its already compelling data management efficiencies. EMA looks forward to watching Blazent’s transformation and the impacts it has on digital transformation across the industry as it introduces new use-case-focused values through an enhanced big-data platform designed to deliver a wide range of automated, analytic insights.

About Blazent

Blazent is the leader in IT data intelligence. The Blazent Data Intelligence Platform is powered by the company’s big data engine and patent-pending 5-step Data Evolution Process. The platform transforms and validates all IT data, enabling enterprises and Managed Service Providers to make business decisions based upon complete and accurate data. Blazent is headquartered in Silicon Valley. For more information, visit www.Blazent.com or follow us on Twitter @Blazent.