Posts tagged ‘Transaction Management’
BTM what is it for me?… really
While on my spinning bicycle in class this early morning on a cool New York day, I was cycling and grooving alon
g on Diana Ross “if there’s a cure for THIS, i don’t want it”….. Being thankful I have time to do things I love. It reminded me of discussion I had with people working in IT multiple times; we IT have it though there is very little time for personal life:
we know our users are complaining, we know we are losing business, we have been trying to identify the issue for days, I am losing credibility, I missed several friends dinner, I work every weekends, I have to leave the office now because I have to jump on a change management conference call while driving with the kids screaming in the back of the car. I have other things on my plate, like launching our new private banking services, budgeting for new servers to address our merger with ABC company, I need to grow my business, we can’t even have a feel on how our services behave nor identifying simple problem such as one out of five times the browser hangs when entering employee badge number. The assumption I made last week on where the problem might have been are now wrong, the change management team applied a patch against that specific application and the problem didn’t go away. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired….
IT experts would say: “I have tools several, several, several, several tools, and it is true after triaging all the alerts, the tools were able to isolate issues but I really just care about what impacted my users in company ABC. What is the behavior of my most revenue generating transactions today and what will it be after we merge the two companies’ systems next week, how would I know if it improves or degrades the overall business service?”Familiar with THIS? What if you would take a peek at introducing Business Transaction Management (BTM) into your IT process?
You would finally see at this moment the IT consumers and IT producers of business transaction information, knowing whom and what is impacted, focusing only on the most important services. What if you knew the exact flow of the information and the behavior of your special revenue generating credit card application transactions? BTM is a source of rich IT information. It is much more than incident management, you can not only understand the current behavior and plan for growing your business you can see the impact on your services of an unplanned or planned change.
This is the cure to resolve the “THIS”, today, tomorrow, next week, on a constantly changing fluid IT environment. Really who could have predicted that you would transact business via text messages? With this information on hand feel free to use those specialized tools and apply them appropriately to isolate granular application components issues but change the way you think about managing IT, It is not always about technical components. Now, I won’t cure all your stress and fatigue as there always be screaming kids, traffic, lines at the coffee shop but one less thing to worry about, getting a little more of your personal life back, one more thing to proudly walk to your management and really feeling good that you know the “THIS” at every moment of the day and I guarantee you will be grooving along a Disco song….
Putting a Price Tag on BTM
Thoughts on the real value of BTM and why the current ROI models, which are typically based on cost savings, are missing the point.
Continue Reading August 25, 2009 at 11:31 pm Assaf Amit Leave a comment
Manage IT with Business Impact not with Traffic Lights
I’ve been using the phrase “If everything is important then nothing is important” quite a lot in the last week. In my desperate attempts as a product manager to respond to every email, enhancement request, PRD, conference call and tweet it’s becoming quite challenging to say the least. I’m constantly fighting the battle of email and have even tried sending less email recently in the vain attempt that I’ll receive less…which didn’t seem to work at all. I even tried setting filters up on my inbox but still the emails keep getting through, it’s actually a novelty these days when someone picks up the phone and has the audacity to speak to me.
A typical day for me starts with a latte (and more often than not a chocolate chunk cookie) from Starbucks followed by a quick prioritization session. What things am I going to do today that will have the biggest impact on the company I work for? I could attempt each day to deal with email and tasks as they arrive on my desk in the vain attempt that I’ll keep everyone happy which normally requires working till 2am in the morning each day. Alternatively, I can be smart with how I work and push back of things that are less of a priority or have no tangible impact on the business.
Traffic lights don't always reflect the true business impact
What I go through daily as a product manager is pretty much identical to what operations and application support teams go through each day. Most support teams get email, in fact they get several hundred email or even several thousand emails as a result of the enterprise monitoring solutions they have hooked up to every component of their infrastructure. They have alerts and traffic lights configured for their OS, networks, storage, middleware, messaging, databases and users across hundreds of applications and thousands of physical servers. Customer’s enterprise dashboards turn red and stay red because they simply cannot deal with the volume they receive daily. It’s a monumental task to browse through alerts and put all the pieces together in the attempt that you can identify and isolate an issue before the business picks up the phone and starts asking questions.
More importantly, 99% of these alerts have no business context. The alerts contain technical information based on KPI metrics for a given threshold breach or state, they do not provide any visibility into how the alert is impacting the business. If an enterprise monitoring team receives 5,000 alerts a day how can they make sure they deal with the 3 or 4 alerts that are impacting the business vs. the 4,997 alerts that are just noise?
The answer is Business Transaction Management. When you can manage all business transactions across all tiers all of the time you have total visibility into how your business runs on IT. More importantly you can quantify business impact in real-time by seeing with your own eyes which business transactions, users and applications are experiencing service level breaches. You manage IT with business impact so that you can truly prioritise your teams and resources to deal with the incidents that are most detrimental your business. Gone are the days when your IT support department manages IT with traffic lights based on infrastructure alerts or by investigating each alert as it arrives in the inbox that is running out of disk quota.
Not all business transactions, users and applications are equal. Just like not all emails, enhancement requests and PRD’s are equal for a product manager. If you can’t prioritize and focus on the things that have an impact on your business then the amount of value you’re providing to that business is pretty questionable. In many organizations the business is IT and without IT the business would fail. It’s therefore essential that IT is aligned to the needs and priorities of the business.
New business transaction management research announced
On June 16th, OpTier announced that it had interviewed 2,000 UK IT decision makers at businesses of 1,000+ employees across a range of industries, including retail, government, finance, telecoms and manufacturing. The results were significant, finding that two-thirds of IT managers are blinded by complexity of management tools and, as a result, are costing large businesses more than £4.5million annually.
The startling insight was picked up across the UK and brought business transaction management to the forefront of IT news in the UK.
Head over to the press release on OpTier.com to learn more about the research.
OpTier
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Linh C. Ho
Diego Lomanto
