Category: Articles

Over the years, the view of what IT was (and is) has expanded. Initially IT was a mainframe computer, a few programmers, and batch programs that generated reports for a limited number of internal employees. Then it was mainframes and terminals, with applications that handled the most mission-critical (or at least computationally-critical) portions of a company’s business process. These were used by even more employees. Then, over time, IT evolved to mini-computers with many users, personal computers for all employees and now Web- or Intranet-based solutions intended to be used by employees, partners, customers and just about anyone else.
At the same time that this expansion has been happening, there’s been an expansion of the notion of the role of applications, as well as an expansion of the importance of application management. For example, initially, applications were managed centrally, but over time organizations have either stopping managing them (remember client/server?) or invested in IT-oriented solutions that can now package, deploy, and manage applications across a wide range of systems and users.

Sometimes people can look at something and come to completely different conclusions. Take my ten-year-old son. To him, if he has to do something (or if he’s required to do something) it’s not worth doing. He can always think of something else that’s more interesting or more worthwhile.
However (perhaps just because I’m a parent) I believe the opposite. That just because you have to do something doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing. In many cases, the things that we’re required to do can end up being very beneficial for us. It’s just that it’s not always obvious how they’re beneficial.
I believe that the same thing principle operates when it comes to compliance, IT compliance and auditing. By now everyone’s aware of the impact that regulatory and industry requirements have had on just about all sizes of organizations. And while the majority of regulations and compliance requirements apply to public companies, in many cases even private companies have been swept along on the compliance tide. Over the past few years, all types of organizations have had to implement a wide variety of compliance-oriented tasks, steps and processes to help them define, document and manage data and processes.

Doing performance management correctly is like trying to get my kids to wash their hands. Sure, I can create a process or rule for it: When our hands are dirty, we wash them. Then I can ensure that the components of the process are available and responsive: There’s soap by the sink and the hot and cold water turn on easily. But even when I’ve set everything up, and have the metrics established (we need to wash our hands daily!), how can I be sure that they’ll be achieved? And if they are achieved, are they being achieved correctly?
For example, it’s pretty easy to identify when my older son isn’t meeting our performance goals: His hands are clearly filthy. But it’s a bit tougher with my younger son: He did wash his hands. But did he use hot water? Did he use soap? Did he actually scrub for a reasonable period of time (or did he simply pass them under the water)? It can be hard to tell. I’ve also discovered that there’s usually no adequate feedback mechanism to help me identify when there are user or system problems. For example, we can be out of soap for days in their bathroom and I’ll never hear about it. Or they may decide on their own to use one of those liquid hand sanitizers instead of actually washing their hands. It’s hard to know sometimes.
The point is, even with the right process (or application) and tools, the effectiveness of the result really depends on actions of the users. If there are user failures (like failing to report missing soap, using cold water, etc.), then the resulting process is going to be ineffective.
As I will explore in my next column, it’s the same with enterprise performance management and an organization’s applications. When enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle or Seibel aren’t being used effectively and efficiently by users, the business results will suffer.
One solution to this problem is putting solutions in place that can collect and manage information not only on your applications, but on the user experience of the users using those applications. Let’s look at what that means.
Of course, you’d want to start by collecting traditional application management-related information like response time and availability. You’d also want to know the transactional response times-for example, how long does it take the application to respond after the “enter” key is pressed? But-and here’s where it starts to go beyond traditional management solutions-you’d also want to know how long it takes for users to navigate through the application screens.
Are they spending too much time on difficult to navigate or complete screens? Of course, you’d also want to collect information on which applications (and transactions) what people are using. It would also be helpful to collect information about quality of the users’ experience and any errors in the infrastructure or application, whether they’re cause by the user or by something in the IT environment. For example, perhaps users are getting errors trying to connect to certain applications or databases, but such errors aren’t getting reported.

For many organizations, SOA is a not a done deal. Even when there is a strong technical commitment to move an organization’s IT infrastructure in an SOA-direction, there can remain many questions and challenges.

Like it or not, many of today’s organizations have to plan for audits – in some cases once a year, in other cases on an on-going basis. Of course, meeting compliance and auditing requirements takes time, resources and money. That’s why many organizations have started to look at the effectiveness of their compliance and auditing strategies, with an eye to streamlining and automating processes and simply making audits less painful and costly.

Sometimes people can look at something and come to completely different conclusions. Take my ten-year-old son. To him, if he has to do something (or if he’s required to do something) it’s not worth doing. He can always think of something else that’s more interesting or more worthwhile. However (perhaps just because I’m a parent) I believe the opposite. That just because you have to do something doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing. In many cases, the things that we’re required to do can end up being very beneficial for us. It’s just that it’s not always obvious how they’re beneficial.

As a youngster, I never liked change. I didn’t like birthday parties. And I didn’t like having to get new clothes each September before school started. I liked the clothes I had. My mother, however, thought differently. I got new clothes whether I wanted them or not. I got a haircut whether I wanted it or not.
Today’s businesses face the same types of dictates. Well, okay, my mother isn’t making everyone get haircuts. Or new outfits. But the market is dictating that businesses be able to respond in a much more integrated fashion. Not only integrated, but a much faster fashion as well. Today’s organizations need to be much more efficient in using information effectively, managing information efficiently, and turning that information into insight so that business decision makers can make the right decisions.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking a number of large enterprises about technology adoption trends, SOA and business process management. I thought it would be interesting to pull out an example of a company rolling out service oriented architecture to learn from their experiences and perspective.
The company under analysis is a large, multi-billion dollar technology company located in the United States. Like many technology companies, they have two important characteristics: 1) they’ve grown rapidly, and 2) they have a wide range of heterogeneous applications, including ERP, CRM and other packaged applications from a variety of vendors.

Sometimes things are complicated and there’s no easy or standard way to simplify them.
That’s where complex event processing comes in. Complex event processing software helps organizations deal with processing huge volumes of transaction and real-time data-not so much from the transaction perspective, but from the analysis and understanding perspective.

It’s not easy being digital. Even from a personal perspective, the range of digital devices I’ve accumulated and use over the past few years has grown exponentially. From digital cameras to (multiple) wireless phones to PDAs to (again, multiple) laptops to on-line services such as gmail, I have my fingerprints all over the digital world.
While the results have been great – I’m able to manage, communicate and produce more effectively than I ever have before – I spend a much larger portion of my time managing and integrating data, even at this personal level. Instead of an old-fashioned and single address book, I have multiple digital address books. I have email directories duplicated (and perhaps out-of-synch) across multiple systems. Try as I might, it’s simply not simple to keep information integrated and in synch.
Unfortunately, over that same period of time, most organizations have been experiencing the same type of problems, but on a much larger scale.