Solution: How Do You Achieve Business Observability?

Look at your infrastructure and application portfolio in business terms: cost, value, and risk

Examples of Business Observability

How system observability supports business observability (and vice versa)

Understanding business impacts of system problems

You have a system outage for a few hours. After fixing it, you need to find out if it was a small or large problem for customers. If it was a large impact, plan on investing resources to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Even if the impact was small and easy to resolve, dig deeper to look for the root cause and prevent it from becoming a larger issue.

Investigations into system performance based on business issues

You learn that one of your locations is struggling to upload documents to a repository in preparation for an audit. But it’s not clear where the issue is. You investigate the local configuration of their laptops, the local network, storage, and if a service is timing out. You check to see if it is also a problem for other locations. If you do not find an infrastructure problem, you see if it might be “user errors.”

Doing experiments together

A product owner at your business comes up with a new feature that creates highly personalized experiences for customers. This will require the feature to pull data from a wide range of systems in real time, which you’ve never done before. You decide to do a test with a small set of customers. While the pilot is running, devote extra time to monitoring these data sources so you can suggest improvements or even a new architecture in order to scale it up. After the pilot, work with the product owner to make a business case for fully implementing this personalization feature.

Collaborating with the Business

The people who work together on observability

Effective business observability involves collaboration across multiple roles. Business observability provides different benefits to each persona in accordance with their responsibilities.

Role	Focused Questions	Business Observability Questions
Business Leader	Are we making money? How can we increase revenue?	Which experiences increase loyalty?
Product Owner	Are my subscribers happy? How do I increase product value?	What is the value of the customers who will use a suggested new feature (so we can predict if it is worth implementing)?
Product Designer	Are customers fulfilling their goals? What new goals can be addressed?	Which design features lead customers to choose us instead of a competitor?
Usability Tester	Can users accomplish their tasks? Does this application meet our overall usability goals?	Which usability problems are having the largest impact on the bottom line (and should be fixed first)?
User Interface (UI) Designer	Are my screens easy to use? Which interaction styles will improve other applications?	Which UI elements are successfully supporting our brand and should be standardized in our design system?
Software Developer	Is my code running efficiently? How do we write better code?	What is the total business impact of my application (so that I can justify more resources)?
IT Administrator	Is my infrastructure performing as expected? How do we improve reliability and availability?	Which performance improvements will have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction?

Technology Landscape

Tools and platforms for monitoring and managing observability

Setting up a platform to enable business observability is a technical challenge. Business stakeholders have their own set of tools and platforms for monitoring business transactions, spotting problems, and improving experiences. Organizations require effective enterprise architecture and governance to integrate these toolchains to support business observability.

Even so, integrated technology alone is not enough. IT staff and business technologists will need technical skills in a wider range of tools and processes. For example, if your IT staff has struggled with business units forming their own “shadow IT,” you will need to address those issues in your observability journey.

Business applications that support observability will fall into categories such as:

Customer Experience Management: Tools to track interactions across touchpoints and manage customer feedback, call centers, and voice-of-customer research.
Employee Experience Management: HR systems that help provide better service and understanding around what employees care about.
Digital Marketing: Focus on acquiring new customers through features such as social analytics, personalization, content marketing, and digital marketing asset management.
Customer Journey Analytics (CJA): A specific tool relevant for business observability, CJA tracks customers and provides visualizations across channels.

Many modern tools are beginning to adopt standard data formats, making it easier to observe activities across all digital services.

Organizations that deploy integrated toolchains—from system monitoring to user insights to experience management—gain a value greater than the sum of the parts. For example, combining the digital experience’s session replay feature with usability testing helps connect system performance to user insights.

At the same time, system monitoring tools are adding features to help IT understand and resolve service disruptions, moving into the observability tool space.

We expect observability platforms to add more “business management” features in the future because digital service performance has a large impact on the business. For example, you could create a view of customer journeys with system data embedded to visualize how customers react to a new service in real time.

[Source: Stratascale]

Questions to Answer

Steps and milestones toward implementing business observability

You will be making progress on your business observability journey when you can start to answer these questions:

How are we enabling collaboration between teams to integrate system, user, and business observability?
How are we measuring an application's or service's business value? How do we determine if the workload cost or error budget is too high (or too low) to match the value?
How are we ensuring the product owners have all the system, user, and business insights they need?
How does our organization evaluate trade-offs between development speed, cost, and quality of our products and services?
How does our organization decide which products, services, and platforms in the portfolio to invest in, and which to retire?
How are we ensuring that observability activities are baked into our project plans and informing our product roadmaps?
How are we leveling up skills to keep pace with changes in technology?
How are we mapping system performance and user behavior to business KPIs? Who reports on these, and how do we use these reports to make decisions?