Dashboards and analytics from Userworld

This week I’m in Lisbon, Portugal at BMC’s Userworld for EMEA. What a great week with lots of new and exciting things announced and explained (like the Bladelogic acquisition). Yet again I was managing the Best Practices track and even speaking on it for the first time. Normally I get others to take all the slots, people have heard enough of me! Some great sessions, but my favourite was actually the one this morning from our very own CTO, Tom Bishop. I had asked Tom to speak on Dashboards and Analytics in the context of utilising the SKMS, CMS and CMDBs. As always Tom was just fantastic, with some great stories from his many meetings with clients and peers. When explaining the CMS he gave a great example of some other things we now all use that had something similar, in particular using a federation approach. What was it? Well the WWW and the system that is used to allow access to the various sites, the Domain Name Service (DNS). Think about it and you’ll understand that it’s not one CMDB, but it uses many over many geographies, countries, cities etc, and it would be unthinkable to have all the millions upon millions of Domain names held in one DB, just think of the delay time there would be finding the one your trying to display and access? Great example.

The other great point that Tom made was about the old problem of collecting and using the right data to provide the correct formation necessary for appropriate action. Tom quoted the CIO’s lament he was told from a CIO many years ago. It goes like this “The data you want is not what you have, the data you have is not what you need, and what you need - you can’t get!” This must change and finally we are beginning to recognise this and stop creating huge data warehouses which hold everything you think you want and need, we need to work top down and analyse what we need first and then how we intend to obtain it and maintain it. Even the reporting aspect needs thought. You should never display the summary data to the “C” level if you need IT, or anyone, to explain it and interpret it. However it  must be easy for the end user to read, understand and interpret, preferably in their own language (business language I mean here). Why show the SLA results, when they may need an explanation, perhaps what you need to show is the deviation from the SLA.  Showing that you met 99% of the SLA for the trading system in a Bank appears to be a good thing, but if the trading system has a split SLA, of 100% availability between 08:30 and 16:00 AND 99% availability between 16:01 and 17:00 and then 80% between 17:01 and 08:29. So the 99% availability against the SLA could highlight to the “C” level a major issue occurred with loss of revenues, or nothing major at all. An explanation would be required, this should never happen, it must be clear and intuitive.

Anyway, enough of all that hard thinking! Next week I shall stop blogging from the TalkBMC site and so invite you to continue with me on the ITP site. The ITP blog allows me to expand both my audience and network enabling a wider scope of conversation. Check it out and sign up! www.itpreport.com. Back home this evening thankfully.