Optimizing business processes to boost your business’ bottom line

IT’s forward motion towards optimizing business processes and controlling their costs is aimed at empowering businesses to be more competitive at a lower cost and with an improved customer experience. This is crucial in today’s economy.

The key here is to enable IT teams to instantly see technology issues situationally in the context of their business and to automatically predict, and even prevent, the issue’s business impact.

This allows companies to better utilize IT staff, optimize the implementation of their business processes, and achieve greater productivity at a lower cost.

The need for convergence

IT thought leaders have started to realize that, in order to successfully optimize business processes, they need to converge the disciplines of business transaction management (BTM), application performance management (APM) and complex event processing (CEP).

This convergence enables the correlation of operational metrics for IT applications, middleware and infrastructure with the real-time visibility into business transactions and the business processes they comprise.

Using this model, businesses can avoid the common ‘blame-storming’ scenario where, following a serious technology problem, representatives from each IT silo gather in a room for several hours to determine what the root cause of the problem was with no clear consensus on whether this problem is of IT interest only or in fact impacts an important business process.

APM and its sub-discipline, BTM, are a remedy to this reactive approach to troubleshooting. IT departments can utilize BTM to monitor business processes comprised of applications, the transactions they invoke and the middleware that interconnects them for patterns that identify imminent failures.

BTM solutions give deep visibility into transactions all the way from the code itself up to the business perspective and can discriminate between failures, which are important, but not business impacting, and those that have immediate critical impact to the business.

The software can be utilized to monitor complex, service oriented architecture (SOA) applications comprised of many composite services spanning the distributed, mainframe and cloud tiers.

Customer satisfaction and the visibility provided by BTM are intertwined. Once middleware and related processes seemingly inexplicably slow down, end users may experience session time-outs.

These sorts of performance issues often result from the rollout of new application versions or unexpected increases in demand (usually a good problem) – either of which can produce scalability issues. In order to avoid this, IT departments need the visibility BTM brings to see these bottlenecks and take proactive action before the pain is felt.

To begin the BTM process, the software should be able to auto-learn normal behavior and adjust over time and in accordance with company specific policy.

BTM systems can use a combination of complex event processing (CEP) with user-specific policies to learn normal or abnormal behaviors compared to the business’ expected results and to take action. Learning the 'normal' is an ongoing, self-adjusting process where a baseline of a baseline across many key performance indicators is computed.

This may consist of various statistical functions including: rate of change, momentum, exponentially moving averages and other analytics. The system then compares the newly made samples to the continuously learning baseline to understand if there is a deviation from normal behavior and determine if this will have business impact.

If it will have business impact, automatic action is initiated to resolve the issue before its impact is felt. Thus, this becomes a closed-loop approach to performance and availability management.

Calculating ROI on the ground and in the clouds

Cloud computing is no longer a future direction and is being readily implemented today. While the benefits of cloud computing are many, the difficulty in managing the availability and performance of applications, business transactions and the business processes they actualize becomes incalculably more difficult to do.

Why? This complexity is due to the very benefit of flexibility the cloud provides – elasticity through virtualization. It is now much harder to achieve the 360-degree situational awareness a business needs in order to reduce support costs, improve service levels and achieve its desired ROI.

In a cloud computing environment, the challenge of transaction, application and middleware message detection in real-time is much harder to do as the number of places they can be greatly expands and may constantly be in flux.

So how does one assess the benefits of business transaction management and whether or not it is yielding results in terms of optimizing business processes?

ROI is calculated by a reduction in capital and operational expenditures, an avoidance of the lost revenue hidden in order fallout and customer attrition.

This translates into the following benefits: fewer tickets at the service desk reducing labor costs, improved customer experience, preserving customer loyalty, reduced disruption to business processes maintaining profitability and compliance with service level agreements, and steering clear of penalties.

Achieving these benefits enables a business to focus on using IT as it was intended for - to deliver more services to customers, grow market share and no longer spend the majority of the time and money allocated to IT on merely fixing problems in order to maintain current availability and performance levels. 

Source: Charley Rich, VP Product Management and Marketing, Nastel Technologies