IT Metrics for a new company: how can a remote DBA help?

IT functions should come with their own verification systems and quality management. Now, the success of an IT company depends on the five key points – operational excellence, organizational excellence, transformational excellence, financial excellence and solution delivery functionality. Metrics help you analyze each of these five key points as you go along the company growth and analytics pathway.

You need a remote DBA; it is not debatable!

Operational metrics are rather heavily dependent on online application performance. The first parameter is the application speed. The time it takes to render a page directly contributes to your online application performance. The time is available to your users contributes to its availability. Now, this can be a little tricky. When your application is accessible to certain users and inaccessible towards others, is it really “available”?

That is why you need a database administrator, who can define the finer functions of your online website or native application. The online application availability depends upon its primary functions. Now, if any of the regular features it offers is down for any fraction of the time, the application can be unusable. That is irrespective of the fact that rest of the application may be functional and active. 

If you are running an e-commerce application, the safest way is to ensure that all your functions are up and running during your business hours and the graveyard shifts as well. Get remote database assistance for the purpose. If you are down for website maintenance, give a prior notice for downtime. Even better, send an email to your users reporting the downtime and the cause precisely.

Operational metrics

Supplemental operational metrics can include any other changes to your system or database that enhances the operational effectiveness of the batch process. It can affect the overall throughput of the process, the complexity scores and the architectural integrity of your website and database functions. According to RemoteDBA.com online application performance can directly depend upon these supplemental operational metrics.

Each and every minor adjustment can create a world of difference to the overall performance of the site and application. It is quite similar to your regular A/B testing. Set a primary goal for each page, and at the end of the day, compare the actual performance with the goal of each change. Now that will require some keen observation and smart, dynamic coding. It is not possible for a business owner to take care of sales and marketing models as well as observe the business metrics. You need the help of a good and experienced database admin to study the changes and their effects on your customer service level or CSL.

Delivery metrics for your company

Your delivery metrics project satisfaction. It is quite straightforward. You can also see project achievement as marketing model optimization. At the end of each project, you need to collect feedback from your customers and the business. Receiving feedback is a part of your job as a business owner. However, collating them into an understandable report is the work of an automated algorithm. DBAs can solve this problem by meeting your need for a dynamic feedback analytics tool with their own software and flexible coding. They can actively analyze the feedback for positive and negative keywords, which will give rise to a collective analytics report for your business.

Project delivery on the “deadline” or before it is another tricky concept. We have seen multiple projects, which use the waterfall methodology. The delivery time varies significantly as the project continues. In some cases, the concept of a delivery date is rather fragile. Flexible delivery is applicable for projects with lax metrics since you can always adjust delivery time by modifying the scope. In such a case, your project delivery does not correlate with project satisfaction or the delivery metrics as a whole.

7 IT metrics for the new business owner

Not all the components of a business directly reflect on the metrics. Hence, we have compiled a list of seven tactical apps, ops, and projects for our clients who are interested in knowing IT metrics –

i.              Keep a count of the total number of bug fixed for your top 20 systems. It is a direct indication of the technical health of applications.

ii.             Multiple year views of your productivity. You can normalize it with some factor for a more efficient discretionary spend since not all projects are 100% effective.

iii.            Average days your employees spend in solving or closing critical issues.

iv.           The number of hours your company or HR team spends for training per employee per team per zonal office. Training is the most neglected aspect of any IT metrics in a tech-company.

v.            The availability of all core apps. Not only the technical SLA apps. Rather the apps, which are readily available to the users when they need it.

vi.           Customer and user analytics and monitoring. Your company needs to collect user generated data that will tell you how long a logged in user is using your site and for what purpose.

vii.          Which are the projects that are currently delivering about 100% of the planned scope? What is the fraction of such projects and who is handling it at the moment?

A combination of these external and internal factors contribute to any company’s success. You need to find the loopholes in your management and production before you can go around looking for a solution. Customer satisfaction is another metric you should never neglect. Now, we do not see a lot of "generic" customer satisfaction surveys around. However, our DBAs can surely customize an algorithm for your client database. It will help you monitor your customer satisfaction rates, customer reactions and curate your consumer reviews. You must already know, about 93% of your buyers read online reviews before buying anything online.

Winding it up

The mantra is to keep it simple. No matter what tools you currently have, first, sort your numbers out before you can feed them into a milieu of software to generate actionable information.

Author Bio: Sujain Thomas is a strategist with RemoteDBA.com. She has been working in this field since 2012. She has worked with some of the biggest names in the country to help them with their performance analysis and IT metrics.