A CIO needs to deliver excellent service and identify performance problems before they cause negative impact to the business.
A CIO must deliver excellent service to clients in support of the business objectives. A key element is identifying system performance and availability problems before they negatively impact business transactions. Monitoring transaction-level data is important to achieve success.
As a CIO, you have worked diligently to deliver enhanced support for business processes with new IT tools and processes while trying to drive costs down. A new dimension of these efforts is the improvement in the performance and availability of these automated processes. IT usually reports on the availability and performance of the technical components—JVM’s, DBMS’s, operating systems or communications links—of the business transactions. This focus adds little value to the business partner. In fact, it may even create disparity in the views on performance and availability held by business leadership and IT leadership. CIO communications focused on technical IT components can send a subtle message that the IT team is not closely aligned with the business in delivering the value that the organization needs to achieve success.
Instead, business and IT leaders must bridge the communication gaps on service delivery for the IT solutions that power the organization to success. As the CIO, you must be able to communicate system availability and reliability information using language that business leaders relate to. This shift in focus requires the CIO and IT staff to be very knowledgeable about the business transactions that the company is dependent on for success, such as order entry, new customer registration, order fulfillment, billing, payment processing, product marketing, and claims payment. Availability and performance data must be reported relative to business processes to be of value to the business.
CIOs and company leaders need to work closely together to champion communications between IT and business staff for these efforts to be successful. Transaction management software like SharePath is extremely useful for gathering and documenting the relationships between business transactions and the technical transactions that deliver business functionality. IT staff can add substantial value in this process through the use of tools to detect which IT components are utilized by the business process being reviewed.
Ultimately, the CIO and company leaders must champion—and expect—bill of material-type reporting for each business transaction. It should clearly document all of the technical IT components that comprise the business transaction. This information is invaluable for:
- Planning for new implementations
- Analyzing how IT outages impact business
- Preparing for disaster recovery testing
- Allocating the costs associated with IT resources to the business
- Searching for the cause of IT process failures
- Preparing for re-architecting business or technical processes
