Capacity Management and Business Value Dashboards

Business Value Dashboards (BVDs) could be a significant step forward for IT Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) in making that connection with the business, finally getting perceived as a contributor, not just a cost.  Unlike executive dashboards, which have typically tried to present purely IT metrics in a coherent fashion to senior management, BVDs typically are much more closely aligned to particular lines of business.  It helps me to think of the difference between ‘January uptime, 98%’ (Executive Dashboard) and ‘January Uptime 98%, Lost revenue for APAC, $1.5m (BVD)’ 

The latter has certain key differences:

-        It needs the APAC region to provide a link between downtime and the effect on their revenue

-        The need for and desirability for that metric starts with the APAC region, not I&O

-        A lot of information, much of it non-I&O data, might be needed to define that relationship 

Those differences define for me why the BVD needs to be distinct from any product in any specific area of I&O.  Chances are that defining those business metrics starting from an I&O tool will mean the metric is geared towards where that I&O tool is comfortable: network metrics for a network tool; storage metrics for a storage tool; server metrics for a traditional capacity tool.  To have an effective BVD, the need is for the definition to start with the business metric, not be ‘steered’ in this way by what I&O tools can offer.   

For this reason I see non-specific tools as being best suited to being the BVD.  As a provider of a capacity management tool, I don’t see doing that as our role.  That’s not to say we won’t play a critical role in what is displayed, but more about that later. 

There are plenty of good contenders already out there.  I’ve seen excellent examples of BVDs using tools like Splunk and Tableau.  They are specialists in being that ‘dashboards of dashboards’, being the one screen at the top level, pulling together a huge range of disparate data.  As well as capacity data from our athene® software, I’ve seen BVDs with business data such as calls made, orders placed, geographical data, Twitter feeds and more, all heavily dependent on the business application and requirement.  Such dashboard tools are so well established, they also tend to have experienced users, skilled in the techniques needed to manipulate and display the data required by the business units.  

Thinking of my own space, that’s not a job for which a capacity analyst is necessarily qualified.  Their specialization is capacity, and they will concentrate on feeding the right capacity data into the BVD in the right way.  Capacity management and planning are specialist skills.  Practitioners need to understand what is required of them from the business and then have the very difficult job of translating that into data requirements that they can feed forward into a BVD, but the broader composition of the BVD picture is outside their remit if they are to retain sufficient focus on capacity issues.

My preference is to see BVDs provided by dashboard specialists and capacity issues handled by capacity specialists.  I want to see capacity tools that deliver the best capacity management support they can and not  be diluted by attempts to be all things to all people.  Capacity analysts need capacity dashboards, these are not BVDs, but a feature of the capacity tools an analyst uses.

To create the best BVD with the best capacity information as desired within it, this needs to be a two-way street.  Yes, capacity analysts need to understand how to map the desired business metric onto the data they have available, then present data back to the BVD that enables it to show performance against that target.  Of course, critical in doing that is having the right data available – traditional capacity management.

In addition, the capacity analyst still has a job to do outside any consideration of the BVD.  To do this effectively means taking business data and using that as part of their day to day capacity management: correlating business data against observed capacity metrics; understanding how variance in one affects the other; building a pool of data that enables forecasting of capacity to be more accurately attuned to business change.

It's for this reason that with our own software we have concentrated on providing an open interface to exchange data between athene® and a huge range of other products.  Dashboards and BVDs are the latest incarnation of where we both deliver and receive information.  Our role is not to be the BVD, but to feed it and support it, to help bridge that gap between I&O and be seen as a contributor to business goals, not just a cost.

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer