IT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE Technical Overview
Specialists in IT Business Intelligence
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TECHNICAL OVERVIEW: IT Business Intelligence
CONTENTS Page 05 TRANSPARENCY BETWEEN IT AND BUSINESS Page 09 TRANSPARENCY, OVERVIEW AND INSIGHT Page 13 IT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE – STEP BY STEP Page 21 IT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE – THE TOOLBOX
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TECHNICAL OVERVIEW: IT Business Intelligence
Most companies struggle to translate IT spending into business value
IT Business Intelligence: WHITEPAPER
A RELATION OFTEN OVERLOOKED
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TECHNICAL OVERVIEW: IT Business Intelligence
TRANSPARENCY BETWEEN IT AND BUSINESS IT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE - ITBI™ HIGHLIGHTS
Most companies struggle to translate IT spending into higher revenues or alternatively reduce IT spending by changing business processes or user demand and behaviour. This struggle is often caused by a lack of
DATA Any business constantly produces and stores a wealth of data.
understanding of how IT supports the business and how business impacts the IT infrastructure. Two things are required to gain such an understanding. The first is to create transparency in the relation between IT and the business. By showing directly the business value and the cost of IT you can openly share how IT resources is actually utilized. This again will show how business activities are reflected in IT activities and vice versa. The second
INFORMATION Data is only valuable when turned into useful information.
requirement is to implement a common language between IT and the business, most likely in financial units of Euros or Dollars, and to avoid technical terms like GB, MHz etc. ITBI™ from SMT Data merges information from IT and the business and creates transparency of the relation between the two, to ultimately support the business objectives of the organization. IT systems generate a wealth of technical data describing anything
A NEW LOOK Conventional business intelligence tend to neglect even the most basic data from the IT system itself.
from hardware utilization to user activity or service levels. A mainframe has more than 100,000 points of measurement and a Windows server more than 2,500, all recorded continuously. Even medium IT installations register many million rows and columns of measurements every single day. Operational real time monitors use this data to evaluate the actual state, often against standard thresholds. The very same data, however, can be used for creating valuable information at all organizational levels.
IT Business Intelligence: WHITEPAPER
To transform such technical details into useful information requires massive data reduction as well as data refinement and the coupling of data from other sources, often organizational or application related, to create new information. ITBI™ delivers standard data collection interfaces to all conventional IT platforms in order to provide quick implementation and a rapid return on investment. ITBI™ from SMT Data includes more than 200,000 active sets of rules and policies for reducing and refining the collected standard IT measurements. The rules- and policy-engine is called the SMT/Dictionary and this is the essence of SMT Data’s vast experience from many years dedicated to this line of work. The extracted information is stored in the flexible SMT/Transparency Grid, which is prepared for easy addition of company specific data like business activity, organizational data and budgets. This combination of technical and business-related data sources makes ITBI™ information extremely valuable across the entire organization. Finally, SMT Data provides a state-of-the-art user interface for reporting and drill-down analysis, including dashboards on PC, tablets or smartphones and Web Portals for dynamic reports published on intranet or extranet. Advanced users are able to easily design and create their own reports.
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TECHNICAL OVERVIEW: IT Business Intelligence
From unsorted data into structured and comprehensible decision support
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SUPPORT FOR ALL
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TECHNICAL OVERVIEW: IT Business Intelligence
TRANSPARENCY, OVERVIEW AND INSIGHT ITBI™ provides IT top management with information for decision-
HIGHLIGHTS
making and for understanding and conveying the relation between IT and the business.
SUPPORT FOR IT IT BI supports the IT management with information for decision making and conveying the value of IT.
SUPPORT FOR TOP MANAGEMENT ITBI supports the top management with insight into the relation and value creation between IT and business.
ITBI™ also delivers business management information concerning IT service and costs by application, business area, system and department making it easy to optimize business demand and user behaviour. ITBI™ also supports IT procurement in its efforts to plan for investments and budgets as well as to distribute IT costs across business areas according to IT usage. Within IT operations using ITBI™ guides senior technicians and middle management in the area of ITILs IT Service Delivery with regards to Capacity Management, Service Level Management, Performance Management, Demand Management and IT Financial Management. Finally, within the development community ITBI™ allows application responsible managers to easily spot growth or service threshold violations within their individual area of interest. ITBI™ Summary ITBI™ creates transparency between IT and the business by automati-
SUPPORT FOR PROCUREMENT ITBI supports procurement in its effort to plan capacity and distribute costs.
cally gathering raw technical data, combining it with organizational and financial data and presenting the resulting information at different organizational levels and to different stakeholders. The common and consolidated ITBI™ data warehouse delivers valuable information at the strategic CxO level, tactical management level and at the operational or technical level. All are using the same and single data source for information, so we call it “One Truth”.
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ITBI™ focuses on analysis, planning and decision support, transforming extreme amounts of detailed technical data - plus individual business data - into structured and comprehensible executive information. The customer should expect: • Quick installation due to pre-defined interfaces and SMT/Dictionary settings • High-speed data collection due to the pre-defined data filtration and reduction • Fast benefit and ROI due to pre-defined data recognition and standard reporting • Low-effort expansion possibilities due to the central rules- and policy engine
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A new, common language, based on a sublime dictionary
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THE PROCESS
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IT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE – STEP BY STEP THE SMT/DICTIONARY ITBI™ data flow and handling is controlled from a central control program, the SMT/Dictionary which is recognized for its supreme ability to simplify the management of individual policies to reduce vast amounts of technical data and to add individual customer specific data sources. ITBI™ INPUT: Standard IT plus customer specific data sources . As a standard, SMT Data’s tools for ITBI™ collect data from the most common IT platforms: Windows (including VMware), UNIX (including Linux and Solaris), and IBM z/OS mainframes. Communication to, from and between SMT tools is extremely flexible. Data can be pulled or pushed at specific times or intervals. Several data formats can be used, ranging from comma-separated flat files to XML. This flexibility makes it very easy for SMT tools to interface with new local data sources. DATA REDUCTION: • Data selection Only data feeds with ITBI™ potential are selected • Data filtration Details without ITBI™ potential are discarded • Data refinement Data is provided with attributes describing its relation to the business
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• Data aggregation Data is summarized, averaged etc. according to character and potential • Data historization Data is stored at different periods and levels of detail according to age ITBI™ OUTPUT: The SMT/TransparencyGrid feeds the ITBI™ B.I. reporting and analysis tool. DATA SELECTION Each IT platform has several logs for different system statistics. The SMT/Dictionary is pre-configured to read only those with potential benefit to ITBI™. This is the first and most obvious step in the massive data reduction necessary to handle the amount of data logged by large IT installations. The standard SMT/Dictionary settings can be altered to expand the number of data feeds according to customer requirements.
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DATA FILTRATION The amounts of collected data from the selected sources are dramatically reduced by filtering out data fields (columns) with limited value for ITBI™. The SMT/Dictionary is pre-configured to reduce all standard data feeds this way. This complex and detailed selection is based on SMT Data’s vast experience and is absolutely unique. The standard SMT/Dictionary settings can be altered to expand the number of selected columns according to customer requirements. DATA REFINEMENT The flexibility built into the SMT Dictionary makes it easy to include information from customer or local data sources in order to refine and add value to the standard input data, for example: • Measurements indicating business volumes (i.e. number of new accounts) can often be gathered from existing user applications and are easily included in the standard SMT data flow. The added value is obvious: capacity planning is done according to business volumes and server load or cost can be reported per business process etc. • All SMT tools use tables to translate measured technical labels into local naming conventions readily understood at all levels. In this way user-IDs or server names may be converted to departments / transaction or process names to applications / technical CPU- or disk-units to monetary cost-units etc. • Servers from which data must be collected may be defined manu- ally, but in larger installations it is easier to read the definitions from an existing source e.g. asset or configuration management database. The list of data refinement examples could go on and on. Existing customers have shown an incredible amount of creativity and innovation in adding value to their ITBI™ solutions.
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DATA AGGREGATION Yet another way to reduce the initial amount of data is to abandon the extremely small time intervals used for real time monitoring. SMT tools are using intervals of 10 minutes to 1 hour for the most detailed information. Experience shows that smaller intervals does not make sense for ITBI™ solutions. Measurements are summarized or averaged, and in many cases minimum and maximum values are stored as well. Each single measurement is treated according to pre-defined SMT/Dictionary rules based on SMT Data’s vast experience. These standard rules are of course easily changed through the SMT/Dictionary. In addition to time-based aggregation, SMT/Dictionary also supports other forms of aggregation, such as aggregating together all the minor processes, using below a certain resource threshold. DATA HISTORIZATION The last step in the massive data reduction controlled by the SMT/Dictionary is the historization. As the stored information grows older, certain measurements are no longer useful - and even 1-hour intervals provide unnecessary detail after a while. The ITBI™ information is stored at different levels of detail according to age. For each level, the SMT/ Dictionary controls the amount of detail and the retention period.
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Moving from reporting intervals of 1 hour to 1 day or even 1 month, as the collected data ages, especially averaged values become meaningless. Introducing “time zones” solves this problem. One zone could be the daily business peak, another the daily business opening hours and a third would cover all remaining periods. In this way sums and averages still make sense - and three values is stored per day or month for each piece of information. SMT Data consultants assist customers in evaluating and adjusting the default SMT/Dictionary settings which control retention periods and time zones, according to local customer requirements.
ITBI™ output Standard input data is reduced to between 1/1,000 and 1/1,000,000 of its original volume (depending on the data source). Few (if any) conventional BI systems have to deal with volumes and reduction challenges of this magnitude. In fact, SMT Data’s large customers claim that only SMT tools have been able to handle the amount of statistical data created by their IT systems.
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The massive data reduction is necessary in order to present a manageable data volume and data structure to the reporting and analysis tool. Terabytes of raw data in complex structures are transformed to Megabytes of useful information, stored in the SMT/TransparencyGrid. The data model used for the SMT/TransparencyGrid was designed with the necessary flexibility to properly support the inclusion of individual and local information - both as measures and dimensions. This allows information to be sought out and presented according to customer specific naming conventions for organizational units, business applications etc. ITBI™ reporting The reporting is done through a genuine business intelligence interface. This ensures the smart, user-friendly drag-and-drop report creation as well as drill-down and analysis possibilities, which modern users of high-class reporting and analysis systems have grown accustomed to. The dynamic standard reports contain a number of pull-down-menus displaying dimensions to choose from like time periods, organizational units or business applications etc. In this way one dynamic report may correspond to hundreds of specific reports, according to individual user selections from the pull-down-menus. This functionality solves one of IT reporting’s most difficult challenges: it reduces the burden of report creation and maintenance with several factors, leaving more time to analyse the report information. The following example shows how one cost report covers multiple combinations of date intervals, business systems and environments:
TRANSPARENCY GRID
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The time and skills NOT needed always come as a surprise
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EASY INSTALLATION
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IT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE – THE TOOLBOX HIGHLIGHTS
FAST The actual installation of SMT software is a matter of hours, and full production is then only 1 to 3 weeks away.
SMOOTH Data actuality and validity checks protect the SMT tools, and even the rare error only requires a re-run of the affected data.
INSPIRATIONAL The use of ITBI™ from SMT Data constantly inspire users to create new valuable combinations of information from IT and business.
SMT DATA’S ITBI™ TOOLS IT Business Intelligence (ITBI™) consists of products and services. The products include:
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SMT/ITBI™ FOUNDATION The SMT/ITBI Foundation provides you with a web portal using BI functionality to visualize the myriad of information, stored in the SMT/TransparencyGrid, in a simple and manageable way. Each user can create personalized reports by selecting combinations of dimensions from drop-down menus. With a few mouse clicks it is possible to move from overview to detail through drill-down functions within the individual reports. SMT PRODUCT SUITE The SMT Product Suite is based on the SMT Data “Law Book”, which describes how to collect, select, refine, aggregate and historize information from IBM z/OS mainframe as well as Windows, VMware, UNIX, and Linux; the unique reporting facilities creates a long-needed transparency. Customers with outsourced IT operations benefit from the solution by optimizing the outsourcing costs through “monitoring” the provider’s optimization efforts. ITBI™ Transparency Suite Collects and historizes information from applications on all platforms with a focus on resource consumption, bottlenecks, volumes per business system. Combined with organizational input, cost distribution policies and information from other SMT products this can be used to distribute IT costs on business areas according to consumption of IT resources. The result is a unique overview and transparency of IT usage in your organization as a whole, in your business applications, for your workload license charges and with regard to IT costs in general.
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PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND OPERATION The time and skills NOT needed to install SMT tools always take new customers by surprise. The actual software installation a few hours - the customization needed to produce meaningful reports with local customized naming conventions normally takes another 1 - 2 working days depending on installation complexity and information availability. The follow-on “test” period, which is actually used for verification of local customization, sometimes lasts for up to 2 - 3 weeks. But SMT tools are in full production 1 to 3 weeks after the product installation begins. Daily operation is then smooth and stable. Even with local customer additions, there are no problems with double updates, missing data, handling of re-runs etc. Data actuality and validity checks ensure high data quality. And should an error eventually occur, the affected update can simply be re-run without rollback or other time consuming preparations. SOLUTION MAINTENANCE AND DEVELOPMENT Once an ITBI™ solution is in production, the transparency it creates will inspire the various users to further exploit the enormous potential of combining information from IT and Business. With flexible input controls, superior data handling and smooth report creation, SMT tools has led to many innovative local solutions in cases where customers needed improved transparency. Mapping IT measurements against business activity - or translating technical units into cost units - makes the resulting information comprehensible at all levels, virtually creating a common language for IT and business. The diverse user base plays a major part in the success of SMT Data’s ITBI™ solutions - depending on different organizational units to keep “their” input (i.e. naming conventions) up to date is no problem since they benefit from the resulting information themselves. Frequent addition of new customer-specific and value adding innovations does not go unnoticed. SMT solutions tend to become
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central and recognized sources of transparency, overview and insight with a high profile within the organization. Luckily, the success is not too hard to handle since the on-going innovation is possible with a surprisingly low effort through the central control features of the SMT/Dictionary. SMT DATA AS AN INDEPENDENT PARTNER Many customers work closely together with SMT Data consultants as the optimal way to assist or relieve local resources. And if local resources are no longer at hand (often after outsourcing) it might be considered “smart-sourcing” to use SMT Data as an independent partner. In order to optimize and standardize such customer requirements, SMT Data has developed a range of ITBI™ Professional Services. The
CONTACT HEAD OFFICE: SMT Data A/S Harbour House Sundkrogsgade 21 DK-2100 Copenhagen Denmark Phone: +45 3962 8887 Fax:+45 3962 9687 Sales: sales@smtdata.com Support:support@smtdata.com Website: www.smtdata.com SMT Data, Benelux: salesbenelux@smtdata.com SMT Data, Denmark: salesdenmark@smtdata.com
ITBI™ services include:
SMT Data, Germany: salesgermany@smtdata.com
• Product installation
SMT Data, Norway: salesnorway@smtdata.com
• Product customization • Product maintenance • Individual product add-ons • Task sourcing (individual tasks out-sourced to SMT Data) • Managed services (entire process out-sourced to SMT Data) • Periodic Optimization Audits (SMT Data reviews the customer site’s cost saving or service optimization potentials and present the result at a management level) • ITBI™ Implementation (selected products, services and processes) ITBI™ TIME LINE An implemented ITBI™ solution is rarely static. Existing solutions are expanded continuously according to the innovation it inspires among its broad variety of users. However, the standard interfaces and setup from SMT Data make sure that an ITBI™ solution will start proving its worth already before the first full month of data collection.
SMT Data, Spain: salesspain@smtdata.com SMT Data, Sweden: salessweden@smtdata.com SMT Data, UK: salesuk@smtdata.com
IT business intelligence creates complete transparency at the relation between IT and business. And in the process it not only facilitates vast savings and huge going in efficiency. It also builds a common language between people who speak in terabytes per second and those who see the world in millions of Euros per quarter. We have written and printed a magazine full of examples of what IT BI can help business achieve. We’d love to send one, because it ‘s all good news