In today’s hyper-competitive business world, organizations are heavily banking on technology. This is transforming IT from being merely a business enabler, to a key business differentiator. It’s become the key factor for helping businesses realize their strategic goals.
In this setting, it’s crucial for businesses globally to align their IT efforts with their business goals to propel their teams to achieve well-defined goals. The IT-Business Collaborative Framework is one such model that brings out the importance of striking an optimum balance between IT and business efforts—in order to avoid bottlenecks and sustain progress.
At many companies, it’s common for ongoing digitization efforts to take up a lot of bandwidth, shifting IT’s “circle” away from achieving strategic goals. This is why it’s imperative for organizations to maintain a balance between IT’s responsibilities and business goals.
In this blog, we’ll explain how organizations can align their IT metrics with their business KPIs using IT monitoring as an example. Of the many possibilities that exist, we’ve chosen three website monitoring metrics for demonstration purposes. All of these examples run on integrations between Zoho Analytics and Site24x7 (a full-stack IT monitoring platform).
Performance
Any degradation in website performance will directly affect how end users perceive a brand. Plus, search engines use website page load time as a significant factor in determining a site’s search engine ranking. Just a 2-second delay during a sales transaction results in bounce rates of up to 87%.
Using the powerful combination of Site24x7 and Zoho Analytics, let’s learn how performance metrics need to be aligned with a business’ KPIs.
By blending the performance data from Site24x7 and bounce rate data from Google Analytics, IT managers and teams can assess the impact of website performance on bounce rates. These geo maps give you a granular understanding of your website’s performance and the corresponding bounce rates across multiple geographies. For an ecommerce website, high bounce rates can translate into substantial loss of sales.
These powerful visualizations can enable businesses to quickly understand and optimize their website performance from a particular location that has high response times to reduce bounce rates and improve customer experience.
Outages
Virtually every product and service has an alternative. In a flooded market, how do businesses retain customers and thrive? One of the many fundamental things they do is to ensure they meet their customers’ needs. In a technology-driven world, website outages are a death sentence. By optimizing to eliminate outages, IT teams can contribute less to churn and more to driving revenue.
Read on to learn how IT teams can align their outage metrics with their business goals.
By blending the outage data from Site24x7 and the subscriptions and cancellations data from a subscription service, IT managers and teams can assess the impact of website outages on subscriptions and cancellations. For the month of April 2020, this business has witnessed a dip in subscriptions and a spike in cancellations. There may be a plethora of reasons for this, but, from an IT perspective, one of the reasons could be a high outage count.
By visually analyzing these datasets, IT teams can be equipped with the necessary insights to optimize website outages and, in turn, play their part in maintaining healthy revenue for the organization they’re part of.
Alarms
The phrase “expect the unexpected” is the mantra for IT teams around the world. To handle uncertainties effectively, it’s essential for IT teams to have end-to-end insights. They enable teams to systematically correlate multiple variables to drill into the problem—and responding to alarms calls for a similar approach.
The advanced analytical capabilities this integration brings to the table empower IT teams with end-to-end insights to respond to alarms effectively.
By blending the alarms data from Site24x7 and the support tickets data from an IT help desk service, IT managers and teams can access the impact of alarms on the flow of support tickets.
This visual analysis, in the form of heat maps, tells us that a good number of support tickets flow into the system during the 12th hour of the day. Though there may be multiple reasons for this, from an IT perspective, one of the reasons may be attributed to a higher alarms count. The heat map shows a higher concentration of alarms between 11am and 12pm every day. To find the reasons for the high alarm count, IT teams can instantly perform a drill down to spot the problem.
With similar analysis, businesses can be more prepared in responding to alarms. These insights can also help them optimize their IT resources.
Summary
Our ever-expanding technology boom is driving businesses to embrace IT as a key business differentiator. This has the paved way for IT monitoring to become an indispensable component of any business.
A robust IT monitoring platform can help businesses in end-to-end monitoring of their IT assets worldwide. However, in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) world driven by incomprehensible market forces, it’s extremely important to align your IT efforts with your business goals, as described in the IT-Business Collaborative Framework.
A powerful BI application, when combined with a robust IT monitoring platform, can add a layer of mission-critical insights for organizations to give a business angle to their IT efforts. This combination can be one of several enablers to help you achieve your strategic business goals.
As one of the forerunners in offering integrations, Zoho Analytics currently integrates with several leading IT applications. Learn more about our integrations.
Sign up to explore how Zoho Analytics can help you align your IT monitoring metrics with business KPIs.
Or watch our webinar: “Align IT monitoring metrics and business KPIs using Advanced Analytics“.
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