What's your role at Sumerian?
My role as a Principal Analyst involves working with our clients to understand their challenges and pull together the right mix of analytics to meet their needs. This could be anything from improving IT performance and capacity management, through to modelling the impact of integration changes, right up to strategic planning for mergers and acquisitions.
What type of analytics have you been working on recently?
Recently, I've been doing a lot of work around capacity planning. It's an area that's helping a lot of our clients right now. One reason why is that it's particularly good at keeping costs in check, as it can help organisations "sweat their assets" and identify where to redeploy or remove under-utilised infrastructure. We've also seen it being used to improve IT-business alignment and communication - as it's helping teams to understand the correlations between business demand and IT utilisation, and have a meaningful dialogue with the business about their planning. Some clients have even used it to prove the strength of their processes for IT audits.
How is Sumerian's capacity planning different to traditional methods?
Traditional forecasting techniques tend to be very simple in their approach. For example, a lot of teams might use time series forecasting which looks at historical IT component utilisation data and tries to find a trend. This is purely based on historical infrastructure data only (month to month changes in IT data), and as a result does suffer from not being correlated to the business. Sumerian can do this type of analysis, too - it's better than nothing, but what we do takes it a step further by correlating it to the business.
What Sumerian brings is the ability to capture, model and analyse huge amounts of data from the IT estate and correlate it to the business. We baseline it, then take business volume data and find correlations between the two. Where we find correlations, we can make forecasts. So, if the client has a particular scenario in mind, such as: what would be the impact on IT capacity if we quadrupled our trading activity? - we can answer that using scenario modelling. Once you find a correlation, you can make those forecasts and answer any kind of "what if"? planning questions.
Why is this not something organisations can do themselves?
Our clients have access to their data, but what we've seen is that many of them don't have enough time and resource to analyse it effectively. Sumerian can dedicate time to looking at this. It's not that a lot of our clients don't have people that can do it - it's just that we're using these analytical techniques all the time and can apply our knowledge. It's what we do as a company: analysing and scenario modelling. We've built up expertise in how to present very complex data in a very simple way.
How is it helping Sumerian clients?
It's giving our clients a regular view of where their IT capacities are. We're highlighting the changes on a monthly basis and it's giving them peace of mind in that respect. It's helping them to answer questions that the business asks of them. Because we do forecasts every month and project forward by three months, we're helping our clients to understand whether they are likely to run out of capacity in the next three months - and that's helping them to become proactive and work more closely with the business.
Tell us about your background and interests?
I've spent over 18 years in IT covering various roles. Before I joined Sumerian, I worked for Cisco Systems as a project manager in their software development section. Before that I worked for various financial institutions, including the New York Stock Exchange, the European Investment Bank and Prudential Assurance.
I take a particular interest in the whole area of how IT can work more closely with the business. A big part of this is how well their communication is working, so I'm particularly interested in visual representation, and how best to represent complex information simply. For example, The Guardian newspaper's data blog and associated data store is excellent for showing how complex data sets can be visually represented.