You’ve Got Events, Now What? Part One: Determining Your Audience

Most sales, marketing and analyst messaging positions BSM solutions for those in the corner office. In reality, this may be far from the truth. I tend to boil down the key audiences of a BSM presentation to one of these four: Business/Non-Technical, IT Executive, IT Management and Technical. Every audience and consumer of a BSM presentation has a different need for in-context information to be successful in their job specific functions or role. They each have a different perspective and need for this information in different “time modes” (real-time, near real-time, not real-time (daily, weekly), etc.).

Often, a BSM solution’s audience and implementation is based on the understanding of what BSM is by the technical IT staff implementing it and their unique understanding of the IT environment. Another influencing factor guiding BSM deployments may be the objectives, expectations and positioning of the person who wrote the business case for a BSM project and solution (or who signed the check). Worse, it may be completely determined by the vendor or integrator’s perspectives and positioning with little involvement of the proper customer staff.

The key message that most executives want to know centers on these three main questions.

• What are my problems?
• Where are they at?
• Are they impacting my business? If yes, how?

These three questions form the basis for any good BSM solution. They should be adapted into your specific environment and put in context to your audience’s needs and expectations. You must know both your IT and business environments, how they align, and how they operate 24/7/365 to properly profile and characterize the impact IT problems may have on the business (or business changes on IT).

The audience for your BSM engagement may initially be top down. Ultimately, it will work its way to the bottom levels in the organization. The audience or consumers of BSM information must be determined as early on as possible in the engagement process. If it appears to be very top down focused, the initial deployment may be kept very focused with high-level metrics and be status/performance focused. Simple synthetic testing of business services and applications or simple “binary state” (good/bad, up/down, events/no-events) presentations may be good enough to start. (note “to start” – you will have to do more work at some point, see below)

Technology oriented executives, management and staff may want more technical information than other business/non-technical audiences. If the needs appear to be very technical, be prepared to discuss the approaches and capabilities required for this level of data integration, collection and modeling. Discuss options for full navigation and drill down (or drill up) to the lowest levels of individual IT components, metric data sources, etc. Ultimately, this level of preparation, instrumentation, and consolidation is needed to ensure believablility of the information presented at every level. There’s usually an inherent “sixth-sense” within a company about what “feels right” and what passes the “sniff test”. If the messages you’re presenting in the BSM solution don’t pass this test, it’s the fastest way to be discredited and be labeled unfavorably.

Don’t forget to engage with the business / non-technical side. Ask about who the key business sponsors or consumers may be, if any. It’s more than likely that at some point someone outside of IT will see the BSM solution and ask for access. The message presented to this audience may need to be even more summarized and generalized content for someone outside of IT. The messages here MUST BE IN THEIR LANGUAGE, using THEIR TERMINOLOGY, and THEIR METRICS. You must know the business, how it operates, how it’s managed and how to align with it.

Here are some of my tips for success during the BSM engagement process. Always keep these non-traditional BSM concepts in mind when engaging in information collection with a customer. I’ll create a much more detailed discovery interview template soon that builds upon these questions.

• Ask every person or group identified as an audience or consumer what BSM means to them. (you’ll be surprised by the varying differences in understanding)
• How do they “align” IT infrastructure components to the business or the business to IT? (you’ll be surprised by lack of understanding here)
• How can their “intimate service knowledge” be leveraged above an beyond “this server supports this application for this business unit”? (find ways to leverage what people know (Knowledge Management) in your BSM engagement and you’ll be extremely successful)
• How do they see or understand how their roles, actions, activities, workflow/processes align to what the business needs/objectives are? (don’t forget about the people and process side of the three legged stool – technology isn’t the only thing that can impact business)

You’ve Got Events, Now What? Part Two: Determining What’s Important and the Message(s) to Communicate will be the next part in this series.