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Abstract: All too often, IT is a series of complex systems and projects that are difficult for Financial Services CIOs to comprehend. Like CIOs at other enterprise organizations, financial services IT executives face constantly changing conditions in their environment and, unfortunately, have to react to issues after users and customers are affected. The CIO Dashboard can make that situation a thing of the past. The definition of key performance indicators can drive the creation of a central dashboard to manage all aspects of the IT environment.
Through the IT Looking Glass
For many financial services companies, IT is a black box. Projects and systems are too complex for many in the management team to understand. IT organizations often fight for budget and resources because management can not understand the impact to the business. As the complexity of IT systems and networks increases, CIOs’ inability to get a clear picture of real-time data that impacts critical applications, supporting infrastructure and projects places them in a precarious situation.
What has been only a dream of nirvana for many organizations is almost a reality. A crisp, consolidated CIO Dashboard that, in a single pane of glass, identifies the overall performance of key systems and projects in real-time is almost here. Major software vendors are moving to converge business service management (BSM), BI and project and performance management (PPM) tools to make this dream a reality. While the implementation and integrations of these systems can be very complex, the CIO dashboard can be one of the most transformational projects that the IT organization embarks on.
Let’s Come Together
Without a CIO Dashboard, financial services organizations rely on manual extrapolation of data to derive the knowledge necessary to ensure IT service requirements are met. This interaction with many applications containing silos of data results in error-prone decision making and action (or lack thereof). For many organizations, the objective of correlating the data into useful information still remains elusive.
Most IT shops have several types of systems that need to feed a CIO Dashboard. These include critical BSM systems such as fault, performance, configuration and trouble ticketing; inventory; and element management, diagnostic and other tools used to monitor and report on the network and applications. While many large enterprise management vendors attempted to create common interfaces to these disparate systems, most initiatives have been disappointing due to lack of correlation and data integration.
Additional visibility is required for systems that support critical systems and provide for overall business intelligence (BI). For example, the customer service organization may use a tool to track new credit applications for business customers, credit card processing time, and performance of online banking systems. The HR system may track the number of new requisitions opened, staff turnover, and the status of performance reviews. Critical systems that integrate into other financial market networks may also need to integrate into the CIO Dashboard to monitor performance and availability. The current status of projects, tracking milestones to budget and how the IT staff are spending their time depends greatly on the maturity of the process and systems to track these elements. Having a clear handle on PPM allows the CIO to affectively communicate with other members of the management team and provide critical status on business critical IT projects.
Rising to the Challenge
Some aspects of the CIO Dashboard are daunting. Managing an organization by metrics is the only way IT executives can scale. As most organizations do not have a snapshot into how the IT organization is doing, countless hours are spent trying to determine how efficient the organization is and how it can improve. For the brave IT managers that try, they often need to rely on manual processes to extract information to provide the reporting necessary. That type of reporting involves interacting with many applications to view the specific silos of data and results in significant costs and delays in the decision making processes. Help!
Some organizations have tried to retrofit portal software to pull together siloed data; however this does little in the way of correlating the data into useful information. These portal initiatives often fall far short of expectations and often are not fully realized. The biggest obstacle to the CIO Dashboard is not the Dashboard tool or solution, but the underlying systems. Ultimately, the CIO Dashboard will uncover deficiencies and holes in the data required to illustrate the KPIs. The CIO Dashboard is only as good as the information it can collect.
For those who decide to embark on the task of creating the CIO Dashboard, there are some common hurdles that need to be overcome. The first step is to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that really drive the IT organization. While it is appealing to try and grab as much data as possible, IT managers really need to look at the critical aspects of IT and how they impact the business. If they focus on those KPIs first, it will make implementing the dashboard much more straightforward.
After the KPIs are defined, the appropriate data to meet information requirements and where it resides must be identified. Once located, the Dashboard needs direct access to the underlying data; typically requiring an Application Programming Interface (API) or integration bus architecture to allow for loose coupling between the data silos. Some systems, such as ScienceLogic’s EM7 product, will connect to the database layer of the applications and make a copy of the data in its own system to avoid using an integration bus technology.
Financial Service Management
A major component of the CIO dashboard is centered on visualization of critical IT assets such as servers, applications and the network. Software vendors have leaped to the challenge to provide this type of information under a variety of names. BMC rallies around the term business service management (BSM) that integrates a number of products together to work to meet executive demands. BSM manages IT from the perspective of the business and by sharing the same goals as the business, such as growing revenue, lowering cost and reducing overall risk. BMC’s BSM solution combines a number of ITIL best-practice processes and technology management automations into their suite.
The centerpiece of BMC’s BSM solution is their federated Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Their architecture is designed to aid process integration and a service-centric view of IT management. BMC’s flagship Remedy ARS and Atrium platforms were extended to provide this capability, and recent acquisitions with ProActiveNet added additional monitoring visibility to the environment. While BMC is focused on BSM for both distributed and mainframe environments, there is still a substantial amount of work involved to create a service-centric dashboard with visibility across all of their product lines.
Like BMC, HP is also betting a lot on the success of their BSM strategy. HP acquired Mercury Interactive in 2006, Peregrine Systems in 2005 and Opsware in 2007, mainly to bolster their BSM offering to customers. The HP BSM solution, which leverages the Operations Management platform (formally OpenView), is extended by these offerings to provide greater visibility into the platform. Their dashboard then focuses on the health of business services by providing event drill-downs and allows executives and operations managers to evaluate the impact of issues across the infrastructure.
CA’s vision for BSM is centered on their NSM product. CA’s vision is to leverage insight and automation in the context of business priorities. CA’s Unified Service Model, based on a CMDB, connects all aspects of service definitions across the management tools. CA also sees automation that supports delivery of a dynamic, self-configuring infrastructure as a critical aspect to BSM. CA relies heavily on eHealth for performance data and Spectrum for fault and correlation of the network, as well as Wily for application performance information.
Like CA, IBM is also working to tie pieces of their service management solution together around their C-CMDB. However, the ability to dynamically create service models and develop business process is still heavily reliant on custom integration and development. Pieces of the service management solution come from existing Tivoli product lines that are converging with the Micromuse Netcool product line purchased in 2006.
IT Project Visibility
While fully implementing a BSM strategy is a big step in the direction of a CIO Dashboard, a critical area is ignored by the BSM solutions. Without project portfolio management information from current IT projects and initiatives, the CIO Dashboard is little more than an IT Operations console. The CIO needs full visibility into the overall health of IT project initiatives and how any delays or roadblocks will affect the project and, ultimately, the organization.
Outside of BSM within the PPM market, there are over 25 other vendors and products including CA’s Clarity, Serena, Planview, Compuware Changepoint and many others. Project portfolio management solutions often do not easily integrate with the BMS offerings, and they require a separate dashboard or portal to consolidate the information. They focus on providing visibility into time, resource and cost management around IT projects.
Serena Mariner links capacity planning, allocation, utilization, task assignments, and skills to provide a holistic view of their entire resource pool and can provide advance warnings of bottlenecks. For most IT organizations, this provides their first-ever opportunity to manage projects with comprehensive information on costs, timelines and business requirements.
Their dashboard components provide overall business intelligence as it helps CIOs zero in on key issues with the IT projects. Additionally, most of these tools can manage issues and overall base workflows. Most of the products rely on several best practices such as ITIL, the Capability Maturity Model Integrated and Six Sigma.
Business Intelligence
Even with an integrated BSM and project portfolio management solution, what about all of the other IT systems that in the organization? Outside of the largest enterprise software vendors, which focus on the operations management arena and project portfolio management, there are other vendors that are carving a niche in overall business intelligence (BI) and integration of systems across the IT enterprise. Instead of more monitoring tools, these vendors assume that much of the information already exists in the environment and the true value is to correlate it. Some of this data may exist well outside of the traditional infrastructure — in Sales, CRM and other applications that are traditionally not touched by the large enterprise vendors except to report whether it is available and performing well. While BI solutions may have some ability to provide project portfolio management and operations data, their real value is in the correlation of data across the entire enterprise.
One such vendor is Visual i|o. Their Interactive Reporting Suite takes data visualization technology and combines that with modular business analytic components. Their products focus on business processes more so than managed elements to include project and portfolio management as well as asset management and resource allocation. Once you have that data in their reporting engine, you may run scenarios that look at a sales pipeline management, risk management, how ordering delays may impact services, and other KPIs. Unlike other portal solutions that require a lot of custom integration and programming, solutions like Visual i|o allow users to look for patterns and correlate information across business silos.
IBM recently purchased BI leader Cognos to propel IBM into the market. Cognos’ Business Intelligence provides dashboards on business patterns and relationships, including trends, rank, deviation and correlation in a wide array of charts and reports. Most useful is the ability to aggregate data from disparate systems across the enterprise into a single view and drill-down to reports and analysis. Other BI vendors that have solutions targeted at financial services include Oracle/Hyperion, SAP Business Objects, SAS, Actuate and many others.
Making the Dashboard a Reality
BSM, project portfolio management and BI products will likely converge in the near future. Today’s solutions all require hefty customization and integration, but for the majority of large enterprise organizations that depend on IT, it may be worth it.
BI solutions will likely emerge as the winner for many organizations; however, they will rely heavily on BSM, PPM and BI solutions. Those solutions, in turn, will relay on the underlying systems that collect and analyze IT information at a much more granular level.
If your organization is not quite ready for the CIO Dashboard, there are three key initiatives that can help today. The first is to plug all of the holes in your data collection. This will facilitate the collection of that data when you are ready for the dashboard. The second key initiative is to invest in process work. Analyze your organization against a capability maturity model and use ITIL, Six-Sigma, e-TOM, COBIT or another best-practice methodology to fix your existing issues. Solid data collection and processes will ensure that when you do deploy a CIO Dashboard, you can present a complete picture of your organization. The final step is to construct KPIs. This initiative will help you uncover the gaps in data and processes and will drive the entire project.
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Michael Biddick is executive vice president at Windward IT Solutions. Windward is an operational management solutions firm for organizations that rely on their network and systems infrastructure as a key asset. Windward takes a fresh look at organizational objectives and develops a strategy on which to build dynamic solutions that continually increase clients' return on investment, efficiency and overall reliability while reducing operational costs.
Write to him at solutions@windwardits.comor visit on the web at
http://www.windwardits.com