At VMworld in San Francisco, I was sitting in a benchmarking session given by VMware and heard a lot about industry standards and peer rankings. It became very apparent that there is a need for a standard KPI to base any benchmarking activity. A perfect fit to address this need for standardization is TeamQuest Performance Indicator or TPI.

TeamQuest Performance Indicator (TPI) is the best KPI. TPI is a single number that represents the overall performance health of your systems and applications. TPI uses a scale of 0 to 100; 0 = can’t get any worse and 100 = can’t get any better. It is calculated automatically and available in real-time. TPI uses sophisticated algorithms behind-the-scenes that account for non-linear behavior of performance.

At our booth at VMworld, we fielded many questions about what TPI is and how it can help organizations standardize their performance health reporting. It made for quite enlightening conversations for those struggle to determine just how healthy their services are.

What are you seeing? Let us know.

Managing risk is a constant balancing act for successful businesses. Choices need to be made because business decisions are often constrained by cash flow, credit availability and amount of risk. IT can be just a small part of these decisions. IT needs to be able to provide risk-related information to the business so more informed decisions can be made. In many cases this work will involve the use of predictive modeling tools to perform sensitivity analyses on IT systems.

Why is this work important? IT processes the transactions, records them in general ledger or similar repository for financial/audit purposes, and then archives them at later date in compliance with regulations and laws. For example, IT can process a gazillion sales orders but if the supply chain can’t deliver the parts or the shipping department can’t ship the product in a timely fashion, IT’s work could actually be hurting the business by creating large numbers of unsatisfied customers. When trying to address the problems, sufficient cash or credit may not be available if computer system upgrades are needed at the same time the warehouse or supply chain needs to expand. Business executives will have to balance the costs of increasing business volumes versus the inherent risks of not being able to deliver their quality products or services. The executives may choose to expand the warehouse and have lesser performance on computer systems if that action provides the least risk and best opportunities for the future.

Capacity Management and specifically Predictive Modeling helps your business executives make those tough decisions. Using modeling tools and techniques, capacity managers can predict individual service performance at different transaction volumes. Costs can be applied to those different points in time and supplied to your executives. This work is no different than what the warehouse manager, supply chain director or loss manager is doing in other areas of your business. By providing this information, you become a partner, not just the “IT guy or gal”.

Until the next time

Ron

Ten years ago it was all about data collection and working to get good performance from infrastructure components. Toward the end of the last decade the emphasis changed for the better, with IT management tools providing more of a service point of view rather than looking at things from a strictly technical infrastructure point of view.

So what’s next? Jeane-Pierre Garbani at Forrester Research recently wrote about “The Next Decade,” summarizing the progress we are making in the IT management software industry.

Business management looks at IT from a value perspective. They want to know, what business benefits am I getting for my IT dollar? Is my IT organization providing me with the ideal value-to-cost ratio? IT organizations are going to have to focus more on that value-to-cost ratio, says Garbani. I think he is right.

IT management and IT management tools vendors need to focus on optimizing that value-to-cost ratio, helping to ensure that business benefits are realized at the lowest overall cost. As Garbani says, IT management vendors need to position their tools “in the global context of the ‘IT Enterprise’ and show how they will contribute to internal IT optimization.”

What are your thoughts? Click the comments link below.

It seems like you can’t watch a TV program, open up a newspaper or crack the cover of a magazine without finding information on how to survive the recession.

The main theme I’ve noticed is to cut back on what people often think of as must have items. It does make you think. I have to ask myself how often will I use the latest tool that I had to purchase or maybe it’s the new book someone told me about that I am considering buying. It all adds up.

I’d like to know how many businesses act the same way with their IT infrastructure. With the recent economy, I’m guessing a lot of new purchases are not happening. For me, I know it isn’t happening in my home.

This leads me to ask what are you doing as an IT professional, systems administrator or data center manager, to get more bang for your buck? How are you coping with having to do more with less?

TeamQuest recently produced a brief whiteboard series about doing more with less. Check it out here.

You can also listen to this interview with an analyst about aligning IT and business.

And now after writing this, I guess you can say that even bloggers are providing information and asking for survival tips. Feel free to share your insight with us via the TeamQuest Blog.