Organizations must increase visibility, monitoring, and leverage AIOps and data analytics to mitigate “The Watermelon Effect”
In the business world, “The Watermelon Effect” is a concept that describes when things appear to be positive and working properly (green) on the surface, but with a closer, deeper look, the outcomes and value expectations are underachieving (red). For example – work may be getting done on time and meeting deadlines, but the quality of the work delivered may be low.
It is not difficult to imagine examples of key performance indicators (KPIs) falling short when investigated at a more granular level. This lack of transparency and comprehensive visibility can create tension between technology teams and the business, creating barriers to alignment between the two groups.
The Watermelon Effect typically results in a lack of trust and raises credibility concerns. With digital transformation requiring complete alignment of IT, the business, and customers, organizations need to take the necessary steps to prevent roadblocks from occurring.
Here are three steps organizations can take to overcome The Watermelon Effect and mitigate any unexpected disappointments using data analytics:
Step 1: Increase Visibility
The first step for organizations to reduce the risk of an underlying issue is to create more access and visibility into data sitting in their different IT siloes and business domains. There needs to be a way for all stakeholders to look at the data centrally from their own perspectives. This takes collaboration between IT and the business, tying service-level agreements (SLAs) to business outcomes so the technology teams are contributing to the right business metrics. Once the IT to business KPI mapping is established, the data needed to fulfill the entire gamut of KPI monitoring will come to light.
Step 2: Consistent Monitoring to Improve Coverage
The second step is to ensure IT domains are being monitored on a consistent basis. Network teams leverage various monitoring tools to get a full grasp on what is happening at the router, switch, and firewall levels. Infrastructure teams utilize innovative solutions to monitor their servers, databases, and virtual machines.
Application support teams use APM tools to get code-level visibility, ensuring uptime of the application landscape. As each domain develops a clear picture into the performance of their areas, those views must be collected into one, overarching, unified view of overall IT performance.
Step 3: Implement AIOps
The third step includes implementing Artificial Intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) approach. AIOps brings all the domain-level data into one hub as we saw in Step 1 where organizations can analyze and apply AI and ML algorithms to the data to correlate, analyze proactively and move the maturity of data analytics to provide predictions.
With this useful information and actionable insights, organizations can tie overall system performance to what is important to the business – such as customer experience. In the digital age, IT applications on mobile devices or in the cloud are expected to deliver a great experience for customers. With AIOps in the mix, visibility is extended across IT, the business impact, and user experience.
Get the Future You Want With a Culture of Transparency
Preventing the Watermelon Effect from ever occurring takes a committed effort and collaborative approach. Organizations need to provide different perspectives on a unified data set with clear visibility, monitoring, and an extra boost of AIOps.
Mapping all the related metrics in a meaningful way to the right stakeholders can outline performance and improve a company’s ability to achieve larger business goals. Strong alignment is imperative to achieve digital transformation success, and with the right strategy to connect all the dots of IT, business, and customer impact, companies will avoid any unforeseen disappointments as they track the progress of their initiatives.
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