What is the business impact of IT?
Business executives increasingly wish to understand this impact, but unfortunately, the knowledge and experience about the causes of slow downs or failures is not held by the same people who focus on business issues such as the loss of revenues, increase in costs, or the loss of customers.
Although executives want to be able to quickly learn how a slow-down or outage impacts the company's revenues and intangibles such as customer satisfaction, quick actionable answers aren't always easily created. Items such as the cost of the outage in terms of revenues, shipments, retail sales, and the like, require delving into both business and operational data. Teasing out the actual costs and value of lost opportunities often requires a team of people from different parts of the organization.
Today's management software technology has only recently developed the ability to sift through operational data, make decisions about what is happening in real time, and then project the business impact. This type of technology is known generally as "predictive analytics for IT". It may also be discussed as using machine intelligence to address this complex problem.
It is clear that it is time for IT decision-makers to embrace IT analytics and be able to easily understand the full impact their systems and solutions have on the business.
If you're interested in a quick analysis of this issue and potential solutions, I've recently released a paper focused on the business impact of IT. It can be found here, if you'd like a free copy.
The above mentioned paper was sponsored by a Kusnetzky Group client.