Big Data 101: How to Successfully Manage Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity with

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1 Big Data 101: How to Successfully Manage Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity with

2 Table of Contents About BrightGauge What Is Big Data? Volume Velocity Variety Veracity Wrapping Up The 4 Dimensions of Big Data

3 About BrightGauge It all started in our Managed Services business back in 2011, where it was obvious that we, along with so many other SMBs, needed a better solution for managing data and proving the value of our work to our customers. What began as a side project and idea for a client reporting solution has since evolved into the world s leading business intelligence platform for MSPs. Today, over 1,000 customers around the globe use BrightGauge s software to understand their data and drive growth with real time dashboards, automated reporting, and goal oriented scorecards. No more logging in and out, toggling windows or juggling multiple platforms BrightGauge eliminates the data silo so users can save precious time and energy. 1

4 What Is Big Data? Data is everywhere, and in order to efficiently and effectively manage your business, your management team needs to understand the how and the why of your business performance. With such an influx of information and ongoing potential for informational overload, management and information technology experts have coined the term Big Data to define this new stream of information. Big Data is too large and moves too quickly to be contained and analyzed by traditional management tools. In order to get a handle on this new paradigm your metrics need to be flexible, fast, and efficient. To make the most of decisions driven by Big Data, you should be looking at information in order to make mid to long term projections and real time responses. Your business is creating data from a number of sources, including tickets created, hours serviced, sales opportunities, opened and closed tickets, time spent on each project and completed invoices. All of these data points, plus many more, need to be funneled into one simplified data stream. When discussing Big Data, your data is most effectively managed by thinking of your information in terms of volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. By creating a more dynamic system of analysis, you will be able to both organize and visualize your most important data streams to make better decisions. Ultimately, your analysis tools will be able to handle more streams, more efficiently and with better results and help you leverage the information drilled down from your volume, velocity, and variety metrics. 2

5 Volume When management experts discuss volume, they are examining and evaluating the number of requests your business received. For managed service providers, a sample volume metric would be Help Desk tickets. By looking at the number of tickets opened, the type of tickets serviced and the amount of time each ticket requires to be closed, your management team can get a handle on the ebb and flow of your core business competency. Begin by examining the number of tickets opened on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Explore the types of tickets opened and evaluate them against the time it takes to complete a request. Analyze each ticket against your profitability to determine whether your workforce is managing their time and billable hours appropriately. Delving deeper into your tickets will allow your team to explore your completion rate, the average service time and the overall resolution rate for each client or customer, employee, or department. Consider evaluating your customer service or technical staff and IT department in the following ways: Staff: Are the right staff members in the appropriate roles? Are you under or over staffed? Is everyone meeting their goals? Process: Is the flow of information streamlined and do your employees have the tools they need to work effectively and efficiently? Partners: Does your service staff communicate their needs and the expectation of your clients and customers effectively? Be sure your team is set up for success. Ultimately, you are measuring their performance, so define what success looks like. Efficiency Rates, Revenue Over Expense for each client, and customer satisfaction are all important metrics for this analysis. 3

6 Volume If your business is growing, then your Big Data is growing as well. By tracking and evaluating the volume of your service requests, your management team (including finance, human resources, business development and sales) can more efficiently design or reorganize your workforce in order to streamline workloads. Managing the volume piece of your data points and metrics allows you to identify and capitalize on trends, balance employee and departmental workloads and organize workflow and deadlines to maximize both customer satisfaction and revenue. Staying ahead of and on top of your volume, especially where it relates to help desk tickets and service requests, will help your business deliver more efficient and more profitable service. One of the most important aspects of big data is ensuring that you have an efficient way to access the data that you collect! BrightGauge makes it easy for you to utilize your data effectively because our real-time dashboards provide a top-down picture of the most important metrics for your business. But this is just the surface level. BrightGauge is designed for MSPs to manage large data collections in one easy to manage location. And because higher volumes of data allow you to take a more holistic view of your MSP s past, present, and future, our platform allows you to deep dive into your data to find opportunities and monitor the health of the business. 4

7 Velocity Each customer submits tickets which, when An inability to sort data that used properly, can provide valuable insights into their satisfaction, any strategic issues, comes in at high velocities can or immediate challenges. When feedback is produced quickly and effectively, your management team not only stays ahead of any lead to delayed decision-making and missed opportunities. That s why BrightGauge makes that problems, but also starts identifying any trend data available to users in realtime through integrations like information. Every company has a number of high maintenance clients, so monitoring their help desk tickets ensures that these accounts are being appropriately staffed, and the human capital component is taken into any equation. ConnectWise, Zendesk, Datto, LabTech, Kaseya, and many more. When you have all of Additionally, identifying the types of tickets your data from multiple sources submitted can help your management team in one place, it s easy to make identify any issues and craft any solutions well before they become institutional or informed business decisions organizational problems. without toggling through The key to managing the Velocity component of multiple platforms. big data is managing the speed of the feedback and your team s response time. Generally, you ll want to look at: Real time data, to identify any pressing issues Long and short term data, to identify and monitor trends You can organize your data and velocity management strategies into real time, near real time and periodic feedback. Each category is a piece of the overall puzzle of how your customers are interacting with your staff. To effectively manage velocity, your team should aim for a tightly closed loop of feedback and response. The more effectively your team responds to either customer feedback or data gleamed through analyzing help desk tickets, the more effective the analysis will be, the more efficient your response will be perceived and the overall competitive advantage increased. 5

8 Variety For MSP s, two of your most important benchmarking tools are the Professional Services Automation (PSA) function and the Remote Management Monitoring (RMM) tools. These tools can provide both long term and real time trend data for your operations, and when viewed as an integrated system, your decision making and customer management will be more accurate. Your PSA will function as an operating system for your business, keeping track of processes, clients, cash flow, inventory, and billable time. When used correctly and integrated with your other data management tools, your PSA can also serve as a customer management tool, tracking contracts, invoices, and deliveries. Broader varieties of data make it more complex to sift through but open up many possibilities. Where BrightGauge shines is in helping companies to eliminate the data silo that comes from viewing one set of data at a time on each platform. By mixing data sources such as PSA, RMM, financial, and CSAT, MSPs are given a more complete view of their business. Evaluating data types independently can lead to missing big-picture data interactions. Your PSA should fully integrate with your RMM and your finance systems for the most streamlined information and data management system. Ask yourself what kind of data is important to you, billing, network solutions, profitability, better reporting? What information are you looking to manage and analyze? Create your reporting system based on your specific needs. By analyzing a variety of information provided by the integrated RMM and PSA, you make more effective and efficient management decisions. Of all the components of Big Data, variety is the variable that has the most potential to impact your bottom line. Your challenge is to identify the salient information from the noise, channel that information into a streamlined, efficient, and user-friendly tool like a dashboard and track your data over time for both historical and real time information. Easy access to a broad amount of data can be the springboard for both increased efficiency and operational innovation. 6

9 Veracity If you can t trust the source of your data, or the data itself, then you re dealing with a veracity problem. One BrightGauge customer recently shared his MSP s challenge with data veracity: In the last year or so, there have been seven In fact, we recently published occasions when BrightGauge is showing a a case study with CadreNet s different number than ConnectWise for our main service board. After investigating, we Richard Trivedi, who discovered discovered that these tickets go to our catch that the company was losing out all mail connector and they can t display on on 10% of billable tickets prior to our Service board view until we move them to using the BrightGauge platform. another board and back again. A few times it was a problem with the database where normal tickets were starting to get stuck and we needed ConnectWise to recover them, and other times there were company owners sending in from a personal . So, your product has had an unexpected benefit that has saved us from upset customers with lost tickets that for whatever reason ConnectWise couldn t display - but BrightGauge saw it. Steve Hay, COO Yardstick Technologies Inc. BrightGauge makes data accuracy analysis simple. Our dashboards and reports make it easy to recognize when you have bad data affecting your results. Veracity issues have a dangerous tendency to snowball, therefore your MSP needs needs a way to clean your existing data and put processes in place to reduce your accumulation of bad data moving forward. 7

10 Wrapping Up The 4 Dimensions of Big Data Your business is generating new data points all the time. Creating and managing a system to help you streamline your Big Data will affect your ability to set goals, identify operational strengths and weaknesses and outline priorities. By looking at the variety, velocity, volume, and veracity of your data, your management team will have a clear picture of your business model and be able to make better decisions about growth strategy, resources and cash flow. Big Data metrics, when analyzed together, provide information for long and short term trends - data that is integral to the strategic growth of your business. Continue the Conversation Learn more about mastering the 4 V s of big data using BrightGauge s dashboard & reporting tools. >> or Ask a question about big data >> 8