BigPanda, Inc., the leader in AIOps Event Correlation and Automation, launched Unified Analytics, a revamped feature that gives IT Ops teams new self-service analytic capabilities to create new and highly interactive dashboards and reports from complex IT Ops alert data. BigPanda is the only AIOps platform that also delivers a complete library of ready-to-use operational and value dashboards that allow users to rapidly track and measure IT operations KPIs, metrics and value use cases that show the impact of IT Ops improvements to the business. In fact, Gartner in its 2022 Market Guide for AIOps states, "One of the main barriers to implementing artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) platforms is the difficulty measuring their value and a lack of understanding of benefits derived. This is hard to do for several reasons, including IT Ops data that's extremely siloed, gaps in visibility between teams, and difficulty in understanding which KPIs to measure and how they drive business impact." BigPanda's Unified Analytics addresses these challenges with new, out-of-the-box, persona-based dashboards that help IT organizations translate IT Ops metrics into business impact.

I recently conducted a 3-day, remote "Data Monetization: Thinking Like a Data Scientist" workshop for a transportation agency in the Middle East. Doing this training remotely is a personal challenge as I miss the face-to-face interaction in ideating, validating, and prioritizing the business areas that can benefit from data and analytics. However, conducting the workshop remotely did provide some valuable learnings for me. One learning was my "Thinking Like a Data Scientist" visual was outdated (Figure 1). Figure 1 portrayed the "Thinking Like a Data Scientist" (TLADS) process as a linear process, where you would complete one step and then cleanly move onto the next step. But in reality, the process is highly iterative where it is common for learnings from one step to impact an earlier step such as refining the KPIs against which the targeted business initiative's progress and success will be measured.

As more and more businesses become fully digitized, the instantiation of their business processes and business capabilities becomes software based. Any software implementation involves decisions being made which can result in a business getting stuck in time or creating a basis for business differentiation. A lot of these decisions have to do with simple things like what fields are made operational and what functions get implemented or not. Several years ago, I was involved in helping an insurance company with its analytics software implementation. Everyone on the management team wanted the analytics software completed so they could improve their business, but one of the project leads wanted the analytics task completed after an upgrade to their key transactional processing software.

Metrics and Key Performance Indicators come from a shared past and will continue to be interlinked. The future of KPI's is more likely to appear as distant cousins from our current standard dashboards. We already have come a long way from the early days of production tally's and financials only reporting. One of the most significant shifts in business performance reporting has been the introduction of the BSC (Balanced Score Card). I have already made a case for what I call the Biased Score Card for business performance.