By the numbers
Another look at our data on “business metrics” shows that the top three measurements are: business process impact metrics, business activity metrics, and metrics to show end user effectiveness in interacting with applications. Classic SLA/OLA metrics came in fourth.
Other business metrics included metrics to show end user application preferences, and then more vertically specific metrics such as brand impact-related metrics, conversions from competitive websites, and transaction-related revenue creation.
Getting into the instrumentation and analytic choices to capture all of the above is more than a separate column and is at the core of the new research and report. However, a judicious combination of good instrumentation and good analytics (front end and back end) can capture much of this data sufficiently to show real value without having to invest in completely separate tools for every metric or even every “market” as they’re defined today.
Doing all this at once is admittedly a lot but you’re well ahead if you understand it from the beginning as a closely interrelated set of investments. And just getting some of the data in a Phase One deployment and using it creatively can go a long way to transforming your IT shop.
UEM, personas & dialog
I’d like to end the column with two very ideas that are intrinsic to UEM. The first is persona. IT services are not consumed by generic robots, but by highly individualized persona with distinctive appetites and requirements.
An administrative assistant suffering with application latencies and picking up a bad cigarette habit as a result might be one example. A power user developing new business opportunities through a rich mix of data and IT services is another. And the IT professional swamped by acronymic-fragmentation and overblown marketing claims is another overall persona.
Now, if your IT organization were a classic product company you would get to know the various personas of your core consumer groups very well, right? But, right now, today, how many do?
These same issues of personas came up in assessing our research. For instance, for advice on UEM deployments, executives were twice as likely to recommend “get executive buy-in” and LOB and business respondents were four times more likely to prioritize “spend more time getting to know end user customer behavior perspectives.”
The second idea is dialog.
About 72 percent of our respondents saw UEM as a joint and evenly balanced business and technology concern. This would suggest that no matter how good your tools are, and how terrific your metrics, you should probably still talk.
Dialog — the good old fashioned kind in which people actually interact and maybe even look at each other — is key to effective UEM; even if I believe (and our data supports) that social networking will also come to play a greater role. You and the business you serve may not yet speak the same language but with better data and a more committed approach to understanding your “products,” your “customers” and how these transform the business you serve you’ll be well ahead of the game.
Dennis Drogseth is VP of Boulder, Colo.-based Enterprise Management Associates, an industry research firm focused on IT management. Dennis can be reached at [email protected].