Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Liran Haimovitch, CTO and Co-Founder of Rookout
IT Metrics Become Important Business Metrics
As we enter 2020, the number of
software engineers across the world is crossing the 26 million mark. As
Andreessen Horowitz puts it, "software is eating the world," and CIOs are no
longer relegated to the back office. Today, they are tasked with leading an
integral part of any business strategy and differentiation.
As IT responsibilities, budgets, and
headcounts continue to grow, we will be held to a higher standard.
Specifically, we'll need to start discussing monitoring differently. Metrics
such as availability, response times, and error rates are going take a backseat
as we put business-level metrics in the spotlight. These better measure the
business impact of software services and allow you to monitor both short-term
health and long-term value. Does it matter that a service is down if it is not
making money? Does it matter that you are releasing often if you are not making
any impact on business results? Better visibility will drive software adoption
among decision-makers.
Companies such as Facebook and Netflix
have long been famous for monitoring metrics such as the number of likes,
number of plays, number of downloads, etc. As every company becomes a software
company, it's going to have to find its own set of business-supporting Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs). At Rookout, we measure the amount of breakpoints
developers set with our software, as well as the amount of data they collect
using it. This helps us measure the interaction with our software and the value
it generates.
In the year 2020, we are going to
pour a lot of time and effort into learning how to do this. Defining business
KPIs for software is hard, and even more so in traditional industries. We have
to adjust our mindset and culture to put business-level monitoring at the base
of all future software investments. In order to truly understand how well we
are doing, we are going to have to adapt our processes and tools to allow us to
see into the business logic of our applications and extract the data we need.
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About the Author
Liran Haimovitch, CTO and Co-Founder of Rookout,
award winning cyber security practitioner and writer. Liran started to develop
software at the age of 9, and his degree at the age of 14. After serving in the
army as cyber researcher, developer and group manager, Liran proceeded to lead
product and system architecture at CyMotive. Liran is an advocate of modern
tech methodologies such as agile, lean and DevOps, specializing in Kanaban,
CI/CD and compliance.