All Posts in Metrics

|In: Architecture|Last Updated:

Useful metrics have to satisfy the seven C’s.

Until two weeks ago it was the six C’s (Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology, Bob Lewis, IS Survivor Publishing, 2006). That’s when I found myself constructing a metric to assess the health of the integration layer as part of rationalizing clients’ application portfolios.

In case you haven’t yet read the Manifesto (and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?), metrics must be connected, consistent, calibrated, complete, communicated, and current. That is, they’re:

> Connected to important goals or outcomes.

> Consistent — they always go in one direction when the situation improves and in the opposite direction when it deteriorates.

> Calibrated — no matter who takes the measurement they report the same number.

> Complete, to avoid the third metrics fallacy — anything you don’t measure you don’t get.

> Communicated, because the biggest benefit of establishing metrics is that they shape behavior. Don’t communicate them and you get no benefit.

> Current — when goals change, your metrics had better change to or they’ll make sure you get your old goals, not your current ones.

The six C’s seemed to do the job quite well, right up until I got serious about establishing application integration health metrics. That’s when I discovered that (1) just satisfying these six turned out to be pretty tough; and (2) six didn’t quite do the job.

To give you a sense of the challenge, consider what makes an application’s integration healthy or unhealthy. There are two factors at work.

The first is the integration technique. At one extreme we have swivel-chairing, also known as integration by manual re-keying. Less bad but still bad are custom, batch point-to-point interfaces.

At the other extreme are integration platforms like enterprise application integration (EAI), enterprise service busses (ESB) and Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) that provide for synchronization and access by way of single, well-engineered connectors.

Less good but still pretty good are unified data stores (UDS).

The second factor is the integration count — the more interfaces needed to keep an application’s data synchronized to every other application’s data, the worse the integration score.

Here’s where it gets tricky.

The biggest challenge turned out to be crafting a Consistent metric. Without taking you through all the ins and outs of how I eventually solved the problem (sorry — there is some consulting IP I do need to charge for) I did arrive at a metric that reliably got smaller with better integration engineering and bigger with an integration tangle.

The metric did well at establishing better and worse. But it failed to establish good vs bad. I needed a seventh C.

Well, to be entirely honest about it, I needed an “R” (range), but since “Seven C’s” sounds much cooler than “Six C’s and an R,” Continuum won the naming challenge.

What it means: Good metrics have to be placed on a well-defined continuum whose poles are the worst possible reading on one end and the best possible reading on the other.

When it comes to integration, the best possible situation is a single connector to an ESB or equivalent integration platform.

The worst possible situation is a bit more interesting to define, but with some ingenuity I was able to do this, too. Rather than detail it out here I’ll leave it as an exercise for my fellow KJR metrics nerds. The Comments await you.

The point

The point of this week’s exercise isn’t how to measure the health of your enterprise architecture’s integration layer.

It also isn’t to introduce the 7th C, although I’m delighted to do so.

The point is how much thought and effort went into constructing this one metric, which is just one of twenty or so characteristics of application health that need measurement.

Application and integration health are, in turn, two of five contributors to the health of a company’s overall enterprise technical architecture, the enterprise technical architecture is one of four factors that determine IT’s overall organizational health, and IT health is one of ten dimensions that comprise the overall enterprise.

Which, at last, gets to the key issue.

If you agree with the proposition that you can’t manage if you can’t measure, everything that must be managed must be measured.

Count up everything in the enterprise that has to be managed, and considering just how hard it is to construct metrics that can sail the 7 C’s …

… is it more likely your company is managed well through well-constructed metrics, or managed wrong by being afflicted with poorly designed ones?

It’s Lewis’s metrics corollary: You get what you measure. That’s the risk you take.

Comments

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Travel is supposed to broaden the mind. Regrettably, after more than 21 years of writing this column, my mental ruts seem to resist travel’s broadening impacts: Everything I see turns into guidance for running businesses, IT organizations, and all points in between.

And so, following a couple of weeks touring in Rome and exploring bits and pieces of Sicily …

> The Romans built the Colosseum in eight years, with no project management or CAD software to help them. It’s about 2,000 years old and still standing. That should worry us.

> The Colosseum’s construction depended on two innovations: concrete, and interchangeable parts built to standard specifications. If any Roman architects, artists, or engineers suffered from change resistance, those who embraced the innovations apparently drowned them out.

> The Colosseum’s standard program was executions in the morning, followed by slaughtering exotic animals, followed in turn by gladiators trying to hack each other to bits.

I think this means we have to give the Romans credit for inventing standing meetings with standard agendas.

It also suggests they were early victims of the consequences of bad metrics. Because every day started out with executions, the Roman courts had to convict enough suspects of capital crimes to fill out the program, whether or not a sufficient number of capital crimes had been committed. I presume the parallels are obvious.

In any event, combining the morning executions and gladiators who got the old thumbs down, a million corpses exited the Colosseum’s fabled arches during the years it was in session, although the pace slowed a bit when Rome became Christian and did away with the gladiators.

I guess that was progress. Speaking of which, for the Roman Empire, conquest was what you did if you could. Now, it’s frowned upon. That’s progress, too, I guess.

> While walking through the Pantheon our guide pointed out a row of headless statues. They weren’t, he assured us, early examples of Dr. Guillotine’s work products.

It was due to Roman parsimony. Coming from a practical society, Roman artists figured out the average statue would greatly outlive the person it had been carved to honor. And so, they designed their statues to have replaceable heads.

In IT we call this “modular design.”

> We didn’t spend all of our time in the Colosseum (and Pantheon and Forum). We also toured the Vatican, where, in the Basilica, we saw evidence of St. Peter’s tribulations. As it happens, visitors rub St. Peter’s feet for luck. No, not St. Peter himself but a bronze statue thereof. Bad luck for St. Peter. After centuries of this his feet are being rubbed right off, toes first.

I’m pretty sure we in IT have parallels to muster. If not, elsewhere in technology land I’ve read we’re running out of helium, one birthday balloon at a time.

Sicily has been more relaxing, at least from the perspective of spotting IT parallels. I’m hopeful this might mean I haven’t completely lost my ability to disconnect from the world of information technology. But there is Mount Etna, an awesome and awe-inspiring site.

> On the not-a-parallel-at-all front, shortly before its recent eruption, data integrated from a variety of sensors reported a 10 centimeter increase in the mountain’s elevation (about 3 inches if the metric system isn’t your bag; also about 3 inches if it is your bag only you don’t need me to handle the conversion for you).

Where was I? Oh, that’s right, 10 centimeters, and I hope you aren’t so blasé that you aren’t awed by our ability as a species to measure such things with such precision — a precision that allowed geologists to warn everyone potentially in harm’s way so they could get out of harm’s way.

> On the back-to-parallels front, Mount Etna doesn’t have just one crater, although the main caldera is enormous.

It has hundreds of craters. That’s because, when pressure increases and the old eruption paths are plugged, the magma doesn’t metaphorically say to itself, oh, gee, I guess I’d better calm down and head back to the earth’s mantle.

Nope. The pressure is there, the result of physical forces that can’t be eliminated and physical laws that can’t be repealed.

The result: The magma has to go somewhere, and where it goes is the path of least resistance, culminating in it pushing through the side of the mountain, resulting in a new eruption and new crater from which it spews out.

The business/IT parallel is, I trust, clear: Good luck trying to stamp out shadow IT, which is also the result of pressures that won’t go away just because you want them to.

It’s time for me to head back to the beach. The IT parallel? None.

Ahhhhhhh.

Comments