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Aligning Business & IT
Integrate IT Into the Business
david ching, PH.D.
For your business to be competitive, you must do more
than align IT with your business objectives; you must
integrate IT with the business and allow the business
investments to fuel innovation through IT.
A business generates value by developing and selling
goods or services. The ability to create these goods or services
is dependent on supporting physical, intellectual, and
IT processes. Underlying applications, automated processes,
and end-user interactions must all work together to make
the business successful. For example, banks depend on a
number of related tasks and business applications to process
online bill payments; the end user initiates payment, the
bank transfers payment to the entity that issued the bill, and
the bank updates the user’s account balance.
How can you tell if IT is integrated with the business?
You need to understand what’s happening and how business
and IT work together.
Monitoring Isn’t Enough
Business application monitoring enables you to see how
business and technical activities work together to affect
both business and IT operational performance. The focal
point for monitoring and measurement is the business
application. When you correlate business, application and
technical information, you enable multi-disciplinary management
teams to make decisions and solve problems
accurately and quickly. Business-integrated IT demonstrates
the value of the IT organization to the business and
proves that IT costs aren’t just overhead, but rather IT can
drive innovation for the business.
Because business, application, and technical operations
depend on separate silos of information, you must monitor
applications from both a business and an IT perspective.
Transactions provide the value the business derives
from the application, such as a user who pays a bill online.
Technology components process transactions (issue payment)
and convey them to related activities (update the
user’s account balance). To provide a complete picture of
business application performance, you must correlate
transaction value and latency—the time it takes the technology
component to process and convey transactions.
How can you synchronize this disparate information?
To measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you must
focus on the application and its execution. It is difficult, if
not impossible, to continually consolidate and correlate
this data from independent monitoring tools, particularly
when you’re processing thousands of transactions per second
across multiple platforms and environments. You
need a tool that provides a framework for transforming
data and delivering synchronized information to stakeholders
who have varied needs. While these stakeholders
measure performance differently, the metrics must come
from a common source—the transaction flow through an
application. This type of framework provides cause-andeffect
information much faster than typical business intelligence
or independent IT monitoring systems.
Better Decisions Lead to Higher Value
Synchronized information is critical for better multidisciplinary,
decision-making processes. When you implement
a structure that turns data into information, you
transform IT from an overhead expense to an integral
component of the business that provides value through
investment, not cost reductions. Your business depends
on IT to innovate and support new initiatives that will
help the bottom line. Truly business-integrated IT organizations
provide visibility into the relationships that affect
all levels of the business.
Business-Integrated IT in Practice
Here’s an example of how business-integrated IT
worked in a recent merger. Two large North American
banks merged. One bank had been using messaging middleware
to transport transactions and messages between
its distributed systems and mainframe. Until the merger,
this bank monitored its complex middleware environment
with homegrown scripts and discrete monitoring tools,
which provided minimal event notification and no compliance
documentation or business dashboard views.
Proactive business service management was impossible
with this model.
The other bank used a tool that monitored the business
applications providing consolidation of technical,
application and business information in a common tool
framework. The consolidated bank chose the integrated
solution. Living up to the old adage that the whole is
greater than the sum of its parts, the bank now has complete
visibility into business applications and it has the
information it needs to realize the value of business-integrated
IT. When there are latency issues or technology
outages, IT understands the business impact and can prioritize
and respond to situations appropriately. The end
result? Stable operations and maximum efficiency. Z
Dr. David L. Ching, PE, a solutions architect at BMC Software, is responsible for providing
technical strategy guidance for middleware and transaction management. He
was the former CTO of MQSoftware, a privately held company acquired by BMC in 2009
to enhance BMC’s Business Service Management offering in the middleware and transaction
management areas.
Email: david_ching@BMC.com
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