You’ve Got Events, Now What? Part II: Determining What’s Important

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the constant barrage of acronyms, buzz words, metrics and measures used today as we focus on continuous improvement, efficiency, effectiveness, lean operations, etc. in business and IT operations. What we need today is a simple way to really find out what’s important and focus on that as we prepare to build real-time business service management and business activity monitoring solutions.

My thoughts on this topic have been on identifying ways of narrowing the gap between IT and the business, specifically how the IT “tools” groups can find out what’s important within their organization and specific lines of business.  These IT “tools” groups are typically very compartmentalized and siloed with little understanding of what’s important to IT or business management.  It would be a fairly daunting task to ask someone from this group to know how to implement a successful BSM or BAM solution in their organization without substantial help bridging the gap. I’ve jotted some of my thoughts in a blog posting about a new position that’s likely needed called the BSM Analyst.  Basically, it’s someone who’s savvy on both the business and IT side who can speak both languages.  

Finding Out What’s Important?

How does one find out what is important within their IT organization or within the business? I think the best way to do this is to conduct a discovery interview throughout the various levels of the organization.  The discovery interview is geared towards asking very probing questions about the organization and management to uncover what’s important from their perspective.  It’s designed to uncover what keeps people tied to their Blackberry’s at all hours of the night. It’s designed to find those emotional metrics such as those tied to compensation and bonus plans of management. Your assumptions about what’s important are likely to be way off!

You should strive to interview at all levels in the organization and both internal and external of IT. This will help you find where disconnects may be in the organization and where people really operate outside of the title on their business card.  You’ll be able to quickly see where an organization sits within the various maturity models as well which will pay off later.

Here are some thoughts to consider when crafting questions for your discovery interview:

• Establish the interviewee’s role and responsibilities
• Determine current pain-points and bottlenecks
• Determine current measures of success, value, performance, efficiency, effectiveness, etc.
• Determine how above are measured in terms of time (real-time, near real-time, daily, weekly, etc.)
• Determine how decisions are made by interviewee and how time plays a role
• Determine all the hidden linkages between these measures and any bonus or compensation goals
• Determine what the interviewee’s boss’s measures of success, value, performance, etc. are
• What determines an excellent, good, average, poor or terrible day for the interviewee?
• What dependencies does this person have on IT and their success? On Business (or other group)?
• Does this person have everything they need to succeed?

The discovery interview should be long enough for you to form a picture and tell a story about what is important to each person interviewed.  Ideally, the interview would be completed in a one-on-one session.  If the “tools” group isn’t comfortable in conducting a one-on-one interview, seek the support of someone in your project management office or some other business analyst that may be more comfortable doing this for you.  (Note that it could be good for your career to do this yourself) Worst case, distribute the discovery interview questions and politely ask them to complete at their convenience.

Once you’ve completed a good chunk of the interviews, you should begin to really dive into the data.  Look to summarize, organize and draw some conclusions about what is important throughout the organization.  Think in terms of the organization as a whole and the individual organization silos and layers (upper management, middle management, staff, etc.). Hopefully, there will be a handful of similar areas at the top that align with the corporate mission statement, goals and objectives.  As you move down into the organization you’ll find more specialized content related to organizational functions and responsibilities. Identify all of the common points you can, how the organization is measured, how time plays a role in decision making, any common bottlenecks or pain points, etc. You may also be able to draw conclusions on the overall maturity of the organization in terms of IT Operations, CMM, etc.

Other Sources for Finding What’s Important

• Existing score cards, report cards, dashboards, etc.
• Industry standard metrics and measures
• Standard financial and business metrics and measures
• Read the quarterly and annual financial reports – mine out the metrics and measures here!
• Comparison against your competition? Sales, Churn, Production, Distrubution, Throughput, Veolocity?
• Regulatory metrics and measures
• Internal or external SLAs
• Industry Trade Association
• IT Best Practices (ITIL, CoBiT, MOF, eTOM, CMM, Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, etc.)
• Analysts
• Marketing
• Trade Magazines, Websites, etc.
• Competitors (and their financial reports, etc.)

With these sources at your disposal, you shouldn’t be short of places to look for what’s important.  I recommend consolidating your fist draft into an IT and business perspective and then at the appropriate layers within each (executive, management, staff).  Submit the first draft back to those you interviewed or to other subject matter experts for review and comment.  Follow up and dialogue with them.  Ask them “why” these are important?  Ask them “how” they help them in making decisions and running the business. Ask them how “important, valuable, critical” these are in their role? Establish a “need” and “must have” with each person!

In part III of the series “You’ve Got Events, Now What?” I’ll talk about “Determining and Communicating the Message” using what’s important within the organization.