Hunting the Elusive CIO Dashboard
There’s not yet a foolproof method for correlating disparate IT data into one portal. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare.
By Michael Biddick
For too many organizations, IT is a black box. Projects and systems are so complex that few CIOs can predict a direct impact on the business, making it hard to win budget and resources even in prosperous times. And when the CIO can’t get a clear picture of the real-time data that underlies critical applications, infrastructure, and projects, IT too often ends up reacting to issues after users and customers are having problems.
The answer is a CIO dashboard that gathers key performance indicators, or KPIs, into a central repository that, in a single window, identifies the performance of critical systems and projects in real time. In our discussions with companies of all sizes, such a unified view tops their wish lists. While vendors have been slow to introduce products to meet this demand, we’re seeing movement, and it’s time for IT to take a look.
On the software side, vendors including BMC, CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM are melding business service management (BSM), business intelligence (BI), and project and portfolio management (PPM) tools into overall dashboards—more on these later. We expect significant product offerings in a year to 18 months. Yes, implementation and integration will be difficult, and customization is inevitable. But a CIO dashboard is one of those transformative projects that comes along only rarely and can make or break an IT
organization.
If there’s so much pent-up demand, why the lag in supply? In a word, complexity. The technical challenge of providing hooks into several vendors’ reporting tools is huge, requiring SOAP or XML bridges. If your application infrastructure is homogeneous, you’ll have an easier time; for example, an early offering, BMC’s Dashboard, works well with BMC apps.
Still, there’s plenty you can do now to ensure that when dashboard offerings capable of consolidating a diverse range of data come online, your company is poised to take advantage.
Break Down Those Silos
Without a CIO dashboard, organizations looking to ensure that IT service requirements are met must rely on manual extrapolation of multiple applications, each containing silos of critical data. At best, this results in hit-or-miss decision making and a certain amount of inertia. At worst, working from flawed assumptions leads to significant costs and delays and wasted resources. A few organizations have retrofitted portal software to pull together siloed data; however, these do little to correlate information into useful guidance.
A CIO dashboard is only as good as the information it can collect. Two areas where IT must focus are data sources—including BSM, BI, and PPM—and KPIs.
First, define the key performance indicators that drive your IT organization. Instead of trying to grab as much data as possible, focus on the critical aspects of IT and how they impact the business. This approach will make implementing the dashboard more straightforward.
Next, identify the appropriate sources to meet information requirements. The dashboard will need direct access to underlying data, typically requiring an API or integration bus architecture to allow for loose coupling among information silos. Some enterprise management systems, such as ScienceLogic’s EM7, connect to an application’s database layer and pull a copy of the data to avoid using integration bus technology. These work well as long as you can connect to the external application database; in many cases, you can’t.
Because CIOs work with all parts of an organization, their dashboards need to blend collaboration, business requirements analysis, and Web-based technologies such as Adobe’s Flex. They have roots in service-oriented architecture concepts and as such are less about technologies, more about processes that allow for a horizontal view across an organization, driven primarily by business requirements, which in turn are typically driven by service requirements to internal and external customers. The flexibility SOA brings is a key advantage, as the information needed by those in various roles can differ greatly. Visualization implementation examples include front ends (or views) for CIOs, of course, but also for customers, service desk operators, process managers, financial managers, and executives.
One challenge in making the CIO dashboard a reality is that software vendors persist in presenting silos of information, requiring lengthy and costly custom portal development efforts.
What’s Here Now
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Business service management: A major component of the CIO dashboard is visualization of critical IT assets, such as servers, applications, and the network. BSM functions include fault, performance, configuration, and trouble ticketing, as well as inventory and element management, diagnostics, and other tools to monitor and report on the network and applications. Large management vendors have attempted to create common interfaces to these disparate systems, but the results have mostly been disappointing, lacking in correlation and data integration. Currently, vendors provide BSM information under a variety of names.
BMC integrates a number of products to help executives manage IT from the perspective of the business and share business goals such as growing revenue, lowering costs, and reducing risk. BMC combines a number of ITIL best-practice processes and automated technology management into its Dashboard and Analytics BSM suite. The centerpiece is the company’s federated configuration management database, or CMDB. Its architecture is designed to aid process integration and provide a service-centric view of IT management. BMC’s flagship Remedy ARS and Atrium platforms were extended to provide this capability, and recent acquisitions, including ProactiveNet, add monitoring visibility. While BMC is focused on BSM for both distributed and mainframe environments, there is still a substantial amount of work involved in creating a service-centric dashboard with visibility across all its product lines.
Like BMC, Hewlett-Packard is betting big on BSM. HP acquired Peregrine Systems in 2005, Mercury Interactive in 2006, and Opsware in 2007 in large part to bolster its BSM offering, which leverages the Operations Management (formerly OpenView) platform. HP’s BSM Dashboard focuses on the health of business services by providing event drill-downs to evaluate the impact of issues across the infrastructure.
CA’s vision for BSM is centered on its network and system management product. CA’s Unified Service Model, based on a CMDB, connects all aspects of service definitions across its management tools. CA also sees automation that supports delivery of a dynamic self-configuring infrastructure as critical 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 working to tie pieces of its service management offering together around its change and configuration management database. However, the ability to dynamically create service models and develop business processes relies heavily on custom integration and development. Pieces of the service management picture come from Tivoli product lines that are converging with the Micromuse Netcool product, purchased in 2006.
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IT project visibility: While fully implementing a BSM strategy is a big step toward a CIO dashboard, without project portfolio management information from current IT projects and initiatives, the dashboard is little more than an IT operations console. The CIO needs to see the overall health of an IT project and how any delays or roadblocks will affect it and, ultimately, the organization. Metrics include the status of projects, the ability to track milestones to budget, and a view of how the IT staff spends its time. Having a clear handle on PPM lets the CIO effectively communicate with other members of the management team and provide the status of business-critical IT projects, but how well this class of data can be brought into a dashboard depends on the maturity of the tracking process and systems.
There are 25-plus vendors doing this, including CA Clarity, Compuware Changepoint, Planview, and Serena. PPM systems often don’t integrate well with BSM offerings, requiring a separate dashboard or portal to consolidate 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 an entire resource pool and advance warnings of bottlenecks. For most IT organizations, this is the first-ever opportunity to manage projects with comprehensive information on costs, timelines, and business requirements.
Dashboard components let CIOs zero in on key issues surrounding IT projects. Most of these tools also can manage several workflow models and rely on best practices such as ITIL, Capability Maturity Model Integration, and Six Sigma.
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Business intelligence: On top of BSM, additional visibility is required for systems that support critical functions and provide for overall business intelligence. For example, the sales organization may use a CRM tool that reports on closed sales, opportunities in the pipeline, and bookings versus quota. The human resources system may track the number of requisitions opened, staff turnover, and the status of performance reviews. Order entry, provisioning, and other business software may have valuable metrics that can be extrapolated.
Large enterprise software vendors focus on operations and project portfolio management, but other vendors are carving niches in BI. Instead of adding more monitoring tools, these vendors assume that much valuable information already exists in the environment. The challenge is to correlate it. Some of this data may exist in sales and CRM apps that normally aren’t touched by large enterprise vendors except to report that it’s available and performing well. While BI tools may have some ability to provide PPM and operations data, their real value is in correlation of data across the enterprise.
One vendor to watch is Visual i|o. Its Interactive Reporting Suite takes data-visualization technology and combines it with modular business analytic components. Its products, which focus more on business processes than on managed elements, include project and portfolio management as well as asset management and resource allocation. Once you have that data in the IRS reporting engine, you can run scenarios that look at a sales pipeline in terms of risk management, how ordering delays may impact services, and other KPIs. Unlike other portals that require a lot of custom integration and programming, Visual i|o’s lets users look for patterns and correlate information across business silos.
IBM recently purchased BI leader Cognos to propel IBM into this 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.
BSM, PPM, and BI products will likely converge in the near future, with products that have their roots in BI emerging as the winner for many organizations. However, these will rely heavily on PPM and BSM components, which, in turn, will rely on the underlying systems that collect and analyze IT information at a more granular level.
There are three steps that will help you prepare for this next generation of CIO dashboards. First, make sure all critical data that will be needed for a dashboard is being collected. Second, invest in making sure your processes work. Analyze your organization against a Capability Maturity Model, and use ITIL, Six Sigma, eTOM, COBIT, or another best-practice methodology to fix any shortcomings. The final step is to construct KPIs. This exercise will help you uncover the gaps in data and process and will drive the entire project.
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