This is a complex issue. The part that no-one wants to hear when a person complains about application performance is the comparison between what they have now and how it used to be before computerisation. During the course of many BI projects I have moved departments from 95% gathering or organising data to 95% analytical or leveraging data, with the computer doing all the grunt work while the staff are warmly tucked up in their beds.

However we do have to understand the background to every complaint about application performance. Typically whenever we look at a complaint about performance we seek to monitor and improve performance in the areas of:

◊ Load Balancing

◊ Prioritization

◊ Network Optimization

◊ Database Tuning

◊ Compression

Planning Services and Growth

In terms of planning our application, database, hardware, and network architecture we do need to reconsider the requirements for each system as time moves on. When we implement a new system we do look at growth requirements in la large amount of detail, but we rarely track how usage proceeds against the original plan. This is probably the origins of virtualization as someone looked at the number of oversized servers and sought to use the resources better.

Today we are virtualizing in order to make better use of resources, but in the future we will need to check whether we have the right strategy in-place. Software as a Service (SaaS) also offers up its challenges in relation to speed, especially given that services are remotely managed and are no longer maintained my the corporation.

According to Paul Mah “Application performance [is] set to be next virtualization headache” we may have reduced excess capacity in a pure physical environment the factors were easier to measure. Managing the virtual environment is generally more complex than its pure physical counterpart, this is also true when it comes to managing performance.

Understanding the Business Community

The workplace is changing with an increased need to provide services outside the walls of the office complex. We have been imaginative with corporate applications being used in even the remotest parts of the globe. In the current economic climate we know that more of the business community is changing its work patterns. Can we predict every scenario? Unlikely, and at some time we will receive data from a trucker driving across an ice-road in the deepest Alaskan winter.

When users are connecting to a corporate system whether by a VPN or other remote protocols then security becomes another performance impact.

Can we move the applications closer to the user? Certainly mobile applications are better able to work on Blackberrys or iPhones, but they do still have to communicate with corporate servers. For a sales person dependent on data about stock availability and delivery dates performance is critical before he can take a product order from a customer.

Performance Goals and Measurement

In making any commitment for improvement it is important to be able to measure where we are right now, the baseline. We have to set realistic goals for improvement based on the corporate infrastructure, budget, and other factors. Measuring the environment is important, and so is retaining a history.

One of the issues of performance is of-course human perception. We can be perceived as spending money for zero improvement, therefore we have to prove the improvements over time, and always be able to identify changes to the environment over time. Yes we do have to be speed cops.

Improvement goals need to be measurable and attainable. Part of the problem here is that performance requirements are rarely documented well when defining systems. Poor performance can often be perception, but I always think that when there is a perceived problem then we must understand and resolve it.

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Implementing Business Intelligence solutions it has historically always decided that a data warehouse would simply be re-populated on a new system as part of the disaster recovery plan. In the early days of data warehousing solutions it was possible to simply re-populate the database on a new environment. This is no longer an option for a Business Intelligence solution as the complexity of systems continues to grow. It is essential to consider mission critical the BI system is along with every other corporate application.

In determining how mission critical any system is there are a number of factors that need to be identified. These include:

• Goals generic to the industry sector
• Factors unique to the business being measured
• Applications and their contribution to global business goals
• Corporate legacy architecture

When assessing various parts of the architecture they forget to ask how important is this to the success of the corporation as a whole. E.g. how critical is the success of the passenger check-in system to the success of an airline? The answers will determine a league table of the system criticality.

How mission critical is your BI Solution?

The truth is it will never be the most critical system in the organisation, but it can no-longer simply be repopulated from old data. In our airline example systems relating to safety and ensuring planes continue to depart on-time will always be the most critical of systems. The analytics provided by the BI solution will have become very important in today’s business world.

Closed-loop analytics is becoming increasingly important to many corporations. In one telecom company this capability was so closely tied to the CRM system that Customer Service agents would simply be unable to function correctly without the BI input into the process.

“I want to close my account, and transfer my telephone number to provider X”, takes the agent to a decision based process, that will firstly determine whether the customer is one that the company wishes to retain. Assuming they have retention value the process will provide a set of alternative offers that can be presented to the customer, with the express intent of retaining them. Each step in the process combines the knowledge of the BI system with the capabilities of the CRM. Clearly a mission critical system – central to Disaster Recovery. Not having the two components working smoothly together will damage corporate responsiveness. Agreed the systems are not as mission critical as those necessary to keep the cellular network active, but crucial nonetheless.

According to Wayne Eckerson of TDWI “the litmus test is whether a data warehouse becomes so mission critical that when it goes down people begin to have problems”. This in my view is more the test of when the BI system need to have automatic failover applied to it (as DR is concerned with more than individual machine failure). Many of the database vendors, such as IBM, Oracle and Teradata include failover.

Failover would not have been possible for a server located in the world trade centre on September 11^th 2001, but recovering from the disaster means alternative systems come back on-line within the prescribed time.

Many data warehouses contain derived and aggregated data, which forms the basis upon which specific business decisions can occur. This data needs to be stored and associated with the decision made as an historical check-point. Whenever advanced analytics functions are engaged it is often necessary to update the data warehouse. It is unlikely this data will ever appear in any operational system, placing the data warehouse firmly in the critical path for disaster recovery.

There may be some operations managers that feel adding the data warehouse to the list of critical systems means that other systems are removed. It however important to remember that the role of the data warehouse is to retain historical subject oriented data and is not a backup of associated operational source systems.

The continuity of business ultimately depends on the recovery of the data warehouse as a part of a recovery from a disaster in order to sustain the business and grow from the point of the disaster and moving forward, which often necessitates innovative advances in the marketplace to demonstrate the effectiveness of the corporation.

Peter B. Giblett