You Can Only Manage What You Can Measure – The Business View

[BeSchulze]

By Bert Schulze

In our last part of this series, we took a look at a technical side of measure usage. Before realized how cloud became omnipresent in our life
and that we are also measuring our data foot print.

Part 1 The Subscription Economy

Part 2 Every Day and Cloud and Networked Day

Part 3 You Can Only Manage What You Can Measure - The Technical View

In the subscription economy “Measure Usage” is all about usage and consumption. Only services that are adopted have a chance to be renewed. An important aspect for customers to success and gain benefit from it is to capture and analyze relevant consumption data. Realizing
and taking advantage of the opportunities which usage measurement bring us will result into best run business. Today I have 2 experts with me, Martin Guenther and Himanshu Sewalkar. Let’s hear some more insights from the two experts on this important topic.

Question: What makes measuring usage so important from your point of view?

HIMANSHU: If executed well cloud usage measurement is positioned to go beyond just infrastructure monitoring and application performance measurement. I believe it delivers the much needed transparency to business. In general it helps to understand how end users are using solutions.  It essentially means
that we can gauge the scope for improvement, if we understand where adoption works and where not.  Customers are able
to optimize their own business processes and make smarter decisions based on facts. With usage measurement, customers can immediately grasp what is going on. Benchmarking the organization with peers and amongst business units can help companies identify process improvement areas.

Question: How does usage measurement specifically help companies run better?

HIMANSHU: Well, usage measurement not only supports to make decisions but also to make them faster. Automated collection of data supported with real time analysis means that it is possible to get tangible answers more rapidly and also to quickly analyze the root causes for deviations. There is no guesswork rather you can bring data to the table.

I just mentioned benchmarking. This is already the prestigouse discipline.  Companies are seeking for “Best Practise Advice” to further develop their processes. For example: the usage pattern would indicate that average time taken to complete a definite business task by a defined cluster of users is 30% more than what their global peers take. Such indicators can help to initiate actions like additional trainings.

Let me give you another example – faster quarterly book close is always on the agenda of a finance executive. With peer benchmarking financial executive can see how many days it takes for the company to close books at the end of the quarter. Is it better than average or worse? Delivering additional
root cause analyzes might help realize that the balance sheet activation method for unfinished goods is different than the one used from most peer companies.

There are many more use cases possible with cloud and real time build technology now and many that will be possible once a discipline of
usage measurement is instilled.

Question: What can customers expect from cloud usage measurement?

MARTIN: Measuring usage has often been driven by IT aspects alone. Cloud usage measurement will change this to better assist business executives as well; so that they can drive results and innovate in their respective business areas. It will promote the positive shift from product focused technical usage to outcome focused business usage. Measuring usage has enough thrust to create value for both, IT and LOB at customer.

Customers can measure consumption to influence behavior, they can get advice for best practices, and they can easily go to the root cause if there is any deviation identified.

Question: As a conclusion, if you would highlight three aspects of usage measurement for customers, what will be those?

MARTIN / HIMANSHU : In my experience, three key outcomes for customers are ability to run like a factory,
uncovering variability and improving business performance.

What do you think about usage measurement and its business opportunities? Let me know in the comment section below. Also, if you want to know more hit
the subscribe button or follow us on twitter. @BeSchulze,  @HSewalkar and @Martin_Guenther

Next time we will talk with our experts again and find out how to efficiently install and make use of measure usage. Stay tuned.