In Part Two of APMdigest's exclusive interview, Colin Fletcher, Research Director, IT Operations Management for Gartner, talks about the emergence of the Business Value Dashboard (BVD).

Start with Part One of the interview with Gartner's Colin Fletcher

APM: What is driving the emergence of Business Value Dashboards?

CF: In many ways it is being driven by the increasingly IT-versant business leader that has to fill this gap, that is finding themself in the role of acquiring or more directly having to manage the acquisition and performance of IT, what historically would be considered IT oriented investments. They have a very different view of what is the standard or definition of performance reporting, which tends to be aligned in the three basic business categories: cost, growth and risk. That is how they measure their performance internally. So that is one key driver towards this type of measurement.

The other is I&O teams facing facts. Funding and investment continues to decline in I&O. One of the key reasons for doing so is simply because I&O has to better demonstrate its value. If you cannot demonstrate the value to want the business cares about, then the business will not invest in it. It is very simple, you will not pay more for something or you will not invest further in something that you do not feel is getting a good return in some way. Whether we like it or not, the money is showing that we need to do a better job of turning the ship around and very clearly showing how what we do in I&O drives the business. We know intuitively that it does, but we have to do a better job at speaking the language of our audience, and BVDs can help us do it.

One thing we know doesn't work is tying together traditional availability and performance metrics and handing that to the business functional management. They look at that and they could care less particularly in a classic case of someone saying: We have five nines. But the one outage that was during the last week of the quarter when we close 80% of our deals is what took it down from six nines. So the business owner does not care about your five nines. We are missing the priority, what really drives the business forward.

APM: Does the potential BVD user want a static dashboard or a way to filter and analyze the results?

CF: They will want that filtering and analysis. But there is often a concern that it is going to be too much trouble to gather and define or transform the data in these line of business reporting mechanisms. This could not be farther from the truth. With the exception of some of very specific highly optimized application dependent business processes, you will find reporting frequency tend to vary quite a bit among departments. There are different departments that look at metrics on a daily basis and that varies by organization and geography and function. And there are others that gather information about their own performance on a quarterly basis. So I think that is important to keep in mind, in many ways IT is ahead of the curve because we have always assumed that we need to have constantly refreshing data. You will find that can vary considerably depending on the group involved.

These are compound metrics, joint metrics. One without the other – the business metric that is not captured and aggregated or transformed to match the frequency of the associated IT metric – is not going to work. There is a degree of matching that needs to occur.

APM: You mentioned the frequency of reporting. Do you see BVDs mostly suited to historical analysis or do you see real-time use as well?

CF: There is a mix. The predominant use is in historical analysis, because most business functions do not measure themselves on a real-time basis.

APM: What role do you see analytics technology playing in BVDs?

CF: Proving the quality of the compound metric of a business performance data source and a set of I&O metrics. I think that is the biggest role that analytics technology can play.

I would also expect analytics technology not just to help us understand the degree to which business performance metrics are aligned with particular I&O performance metrics, but that we ultimately start to use the power of these analytics technologies to perform a discovery function to identify and suggest potential correlations that we have not looked at or thought about. The whole value of analytics technology is helping us know we didn't know to ask, or didn't know to look for, and we need that just as much in figuring out what does matter to our business stakeholders. There is a massive opportunity to help us understand what we should be looking at on an ongoing basis and when we should stop looking at certain things.

APM: From a market perspective, where do you expect the BVD would come from? Who are the potential vendors?

CF: I expect we will start to see a dedicated set of business value content coming as part of the traditional executive dashboard tools.

I would also expect a fair amount of similar type of content or repositioning of IT operations analytics tools to do so, primarily because they will be able to build on that strength of pattern discovery.

APM: If a company sees the advantages and they really want a Business Value Dashboard today, what do you recommend

CF: I tend to point them to the current executive dashboard tools. Often these tools are not fully deployed. And these tools have so many prebuilt integrations and ways of bringing disparate data sources of different types and different frequencies, and ways to rationalize that data, and then display it already in what I would consider to be a very compelling, competitive user experience. They come with a tremendous amount of out-of-the-box reports and KPIs, and some of the content can be reasonably re-purposed or modified to fit within the BVD construct.

APM: What is the expected time frame for a real BVD market to develop?

CF: In Gartner's strategic planning assumption we said that by 2017 40 percent of I&O dashboards will be replaced by BVDs. So I would expect that over the next 18 to 24 months we will start to see some real traction.

We get inquiries every single day of I&O groups looking to solve this challenge. How do we demonstrate our value in a way that is relevant? At our recent Infrastructure and Operations Management Conference in June, interest in IT financial management and Business Value Dashboards as a related area was hot. It was a packed house. I think it is reasonable to say over the next year or two we will see some real traction. But keep in mind, this is an emerging technology.

ABOUT Colin Fletcher

Colin Fletcher is Research Director, IT Operations Management for Gartner. He focuses his research on how advances in the key areas of IT event correlation and analysis (ECA) and business service management (BSM) can help IT operations teams continually drive greater business success, lower costs, and mitigate risk. Additionally, Fletcher supports a multitude of broader topics within the evolving practice of IT operations management.

Fletcher has more than 16 years of IT practitioner, leadership and creative marketing experience built at companies large and small including Apple, HP, BMC Software, Motorola, IBM Global Services, Dell, and several start-ups.

Related Links:

Gartner Report: First Steps in Building an I&O Business Value Dashboard

Q&A Part One: Gartner Talks About Business Value Dashboards