IT Analytics – the path to becoming proactive
The path to achieving proactive and strategic IT service management becomes a reality with IT Analytics
IT organisations are under increasing pressure to increase the value IT brings to the business. It is no longer acceptable for IT investments to be based on best-guess endeavours - IT must now justify its productivity reputation by providing quality, business-aligned services that build growth and increase competitive advantage.
An essential starting point to achieving this is in improving the holistic visibility of IT services, so that IT service management is strategically informed and becomes proactive. Sumerian has formulated a model to identify common organisational behaviours and processes that indicates an IT organisation’s current level of strategic maturity.
Analytics maturity curve
Starting from a baseline of Ad hoc (no IT-business performance visibility), there are 4 progressive steps to proactive IT Analytics maturity: Discrete Component Visibility, Service Analytics, Business Process Analytics and Enterprise Analytics. Each progressive step provides a more sophisticated level of insight than the next, culminating in the highest level, Enterprise Analytics.
- Ad hoc
- IT organisations at the Ad hoc level operate with little or no visibility on how their IT estate functions against business demand and performance. Whilst there may be some monitoring of individual IT infrastructure components, this is usually only instigated in break/fix situations and not applied toward any proactive management. Reporting metrics provided at this level are typically based on IT downtime and availability only - and consequently, bear little or no meaningful to the business.
- Discrete Component Visibility
- Whether or not they have a formal strategy to guide them, most large IT organisations have striven to improve business alignment and progress from a purely reactive standing. However, many have failed to achieve this despite often significant investment in IT monitoring software. As a result, many IT organisations currently reside at the Discrete Component Visibility level, where IT performance is monitored at the level of individual infrastructure units.
Although a clear view on the performance and capacity of individual infrastructure components is established, where this type of monitoring becomes restricted is that the visibility obtained remains siloed and typically reports issues on real-time thresholds and triggers – giving little notice to take proactive action. Whilst IT performance targets may be more advanced and set against business SLA targets, these metrics still tend to be centred on IT component downtime and availability and, as such, do not help to validate IT’s contribution and foster closer working relationships with the business. - Service Analytics
- Service Analytics forms the first true step to IT Value Analytics maturity by providing integrated, end-to-end holistic visibility of individual IT services - enabling a strategic understanding of how an IT service as a whole performs against business demand.
By analysing the end-to-end performance (availability, latency, costs and capacity) over time, precise identification of areas for improvements, rationalisation and cost reduction can be readily identified, enabling IT organisations to shift from reactive to proactive service management.
Download the white paper - Improving IT Services Management with Service Analytics - Business Process Analytics
- The next step to maturity, Business Process Analytics, enables even deeper examination of the impact different types of business processes and users have on the demand for IT services. This progressive understanding enables IT organisations to target IT services to particular user groups and, as a result, deliver even greater IT to business alignment.
Download the white paper - Increasing IT alignment with Business Process Analytics - Enterprise Analytics
- The highest level of maturity, Enterprise Analytics, enables IT organisations to achieve a highly sophisticated and advanced understanding of IT’s impact on the business, comparing like-for-like performance of individual business processes. Enterprise Analytics provides definitive understanding of how IT intensity (total number of IT-enabled services), IT spend, users, business processes and targets correlate to one another – enabling a strategic understanding of how IT investment contributes to the company’s overall suite of processes and goals.