In part one of this blog series we spoke about Operational Intelligence adoption level 1 which is focused on searching and investigating your data. In part two we described Operational Intelligence adoption level 2 that enables organisations to become more proactive and be alerted to patterns in data in real-time.
Operational Intelligence adoption level 3 is where real-time analytics starts to play an important part in visualising your IT, security or customer focused operations. The amount and types of data that organisations analyse is typically larger and the intelligence will be accessed by a wider range of people. Let’s get into more detail on adoption level 3:
IT Ops
You’re likely to have delivered some form of real-time reporting and analytics from the machine data generated by your IT and application estate. Most organisations at OI level 3 start take a service-oriented view of their IT environment and offer on-the-fly reports and data visualisations. This often takes the form of IT Operational Analytics (ITOA). ITOA allows you to see, graphically, how applications, servers and devices make up business-critical IT services like email, storage and virtualisation. You will track IT KPIs on a dashboard and then drill down into a very granular and detailed view at any level of the infrastructure. You have likely started to provide some form of self-service analytics to allow anyone in IT to use machine data to help improve performance, but also started to offer value to the business from data that has typically been the domain of IT. At the next stage of OI maturity, most organisations are offering real-time insights from a very wide range of data to support key business decisions.
Security
You’re likely to have gone beyond monitoring to have base-lined what is “normal” for your organisation from a security perspective. Your security team will be proactive in dealing with any deviation from the norm and deal with security incidents before they become an issue. The data sets that support your real-time security posture have widened to include cloud and the network. Your security intelligence will have evolved to detect insider threats and breach detection. You’ve started to visualise your security data in the form of reports and dashboards and you include contextual security threats. This will allow your organisation to make better decisions thanks to context driven security situational awareness. Built on this foundation you have established scalable and repeatable security investigation processes that coordinate response to attacks. At the next level of OI maturity, most organisations start to deliver real-time security analytics on “big data” and identify Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).
Customer Experience
You’re probably delivering analytics around customers and products. Your monitoring will have evolved to deliver data visualisations on product performance and buying habits. Business analytics are likely to include real-time dashboards showing customer trends and representations of a user’s journey through your website. You may be including social media as a source of machine data to gain insight into sentiment to augment your Operational Intelligence. You’re probably starting to combine data from multiple forms of customer interaction to deliver the basis of omni-channel analytics. At the next stage of OI maturity most organisations start to differentiate through customer experience, offer real-time promotions and obtain a 360-degree view of the customer.
See you tomorrow for the final part – Operational Intelligence level 4.