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Know Your Business

We can all measure the technical performance of our servers: how much resource they are using, how much space our data takes up, how full the database is. What about measuring the amount of business the server processes, while it’s using these resources?

This is one area that is notoriously hard to get objective data about. Can we say how many forms the users fill-in during the day, or how many reports get produced? Even worse is the problem of knowing how long each of these operations take and whether the users are having to wait for their data, or if the system has to wait for the users. The most obvious solution is to ask them – but this leads to generally vague replies and certainly doesn’t give you any objective, numeric data to work with. This lack of accurate data and uncertainty in it’s meaning makes it hard to justify investments: can you say if an upgrade produced the 20% improvement it should have?

KNOW YOUR BUSINESS is a collection of techniques for looking at your business through the servers’ eyes. It maps your organisation’s high-level business goals to the activities that take place on your systems – attributes you can measure objectively and, once automated, with relatively little overhead. The data can then be made available as regular reports or as content for online users (who can be validated, to preserve the confidentiality of this sensitive material) to view and incorporate into their own work.

We start this service by taking an inventory of your business

processes and the applications that perform them. We investigate the nature of the applications and use their output (transaction logs, audit information, activity reports), combined with execution rates from the databases to create a quantitative picture of the business activities: number and value of invoices sent/paid, orders received or sent, products shipped, services booked, calls, letters, your online presence and all the other facets that make your business unique.

From this view of your business volumes, we can calculate how the work is executed on your servers – which ones are associated with the various types of transaction, which ones form the support infrastructure and which ones are needed by your back-office and administrative users.
We can identify any weak spots, such as single points-of-failure, or dependencies on systems that are overloaded. We can also use this information to show you where your business bottlenecks are, which servers are holding back growth prospects and where you are getting the best value from your systems.

All the data from this work can be updated regularly, so you can keep an eye on how the technical side of the organisation is coping with changing commercial demands. It can also give you quick overviews on business volumes, turnover and customer traffic, either through a web interface or emailed to specified staff members as spreadsheets.

This is one of Dalleon Systems' packaged services. The full suite can be seen at services.html. The company is always willing to take on bespoke work or variations to our standard products.