IBM Certification Test 992.6 - Modeling Business Measures
Demonstrate knowledge of business measures concepts
Business Measures view icons
The Business Measures view has several icons that are used to indicate the types of business measures.
The following icons can be found in the Business Performance Indicators tab of the Business Measures view:
| Icon | Description | For more information |
|---|---|---|
 |
Instance metric | Instance metric |
 |
Aggregate metric | Aggregate metrics |
 |
Key performance indicator (KPI) | Key performance indicators (KPIs) |
 |
Unspecified business measure | |
 |
Business measure that uses a template | Business measure templates |
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Business measure that was created to track the value of an attribute and return the information to WebSphere® Business Monitor after monitoring | Specifying monitored values to return |
Modeling for monitoring
To improve how you manage your company's performance, you can combine WebSphere® Business Modeler with WebSphere Business Monitor. Effectively managing business performance involves continuously defining, analyzing, innovating, and improving each business process.
Starting with a process model in WebSphere Business Modeler, you specify the information that you want to monitor by associating business measures with the process. Business measures describe the performance management aspects of a business that are required for real-time business monitoring. They include metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).
You then export the business measures as a monitor model. The monitor model is imported into the WebSphere Business Monitor development toolkit, which runs on WebSphere Integration Developer or Rational® Application Developer. A technical user specifies how the monitor model should derive the business measures from incoming events being generated by a process. The business measures results are collected, calculated, and further analyzed in WebSphere Business Monitor.
You might create business measures for:
- Compliance or documentation: Documenting business processes can help businesses to understand them as well as providing documentation that can be used by staff or customers for training. Compliance regulations often have documentation requirements. Linking to real-time monitoring can provide a feedback mechanism for reporting the requirements needed for compliance.
- Redesign: Documenting both the current state and future state business process allows for comparisons. Monitoring can help with Return on Investment (ROI) analysis.
- Execution: If the future state business process has runtime characteristics associated with it, the monitor model can be passed to application, workflow, and business process development tools.
After your organization has defined strategic goals, you create business measures against which to compare and manage performance.
You can make smarter decisions, gain a competitive advantage and achieve greater performance results, if you:
- Model (using WebSphere Business Modeler and WebSphere Business Monitor development toolkit): Capture, simulate, analyze, and optimize business models to reduce risk and increase flexibility.
- Deploy: Deploy models and policies to realize business intent.
- Monitor (using WebSphere Business Monitor): Correlate events to calculate metrics and send alerts in real time to gain visibility into the business performance.
- Analyze: Gain insight into business metrics and information for contextual-based decision making.
- Act: Respond at the right time to insights through collaboration, optimization, and automation to excel.
- Monitor models
Requirements for business measurements are transferred from WebSphere Business Modeler to WebSphere Business Monitor in the form of a monitor model. A monitor model describes business measures (such as metrics and key performance indicators), their dependencies on incoming events, conditions (business situations) warranting business action, and outbound events that report such conditions and might trigger business actions.
- WebSphere Business Monitor
To monitor different aspects of business performance, you use WebSphere Business Monitor dashboards. WebSphere Business Monitor is business-activity monitoring software that provides you with the capability to measure business performance, monitor real-time and completed processes, and report on business operations. The information captured can help you identify business problems, correct exceptions, and change processes to increase business competitiveness by improving process efficiencies.
- Phases of modeling and monitoring a process
This section describes some possible phases of modeling and monitoring a process using WebSphere Business Modeler with WebSphere Business Monitor.
- Creating business measures
Starting with a process model in WebSphere Business Modeler, you can create business measures for performance management. To monitor the process model in real time, you can export the resulting business measures to the WebSphere Business Monitor development toolkit, complete the monitor model, and then deploy to a WebSphere Business Monitor server. The monitor model calculates the values of the business measures as the monitored process is running. You define WebSphere Business Monitor dashboards to enable business users to monitor the health and business performance of the application.
- Editing business measures
The Business Measures view typically opens by default when you open a process, along with the Attributes view and the Errors view. You can use the Business Measures view to specify business measures or to edit business measures that you have already created.
- Specifying monitored values to return
You can identify attributes so that WebSphere Business Monitor can collect actual values as the process runs. You can use the real-life values of those attributes to update the values of the attributes in WebSphere Business Modeler. This information improves the accuracy of your model and simulations by providing realistic and accurate data derived from running the process.
- Exporting monitor models
You can export a monitor model from WebSphere Business Modeler to refine in the WebSphere Business Monitor development toolkit and then deploy to WebSphere Business Monitor. This monitor model provides guidance to the developer who will complete the model, and includes Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) diagrams for each process, subprocess, and loop.
- Importing WebSphere Business Monitor results
Once a monitored process has been executing for some time, you can export the values captured by WebSphere Business Monitor to an XML file and import them into WebSphere Business Modeler for further analysis on the process.
Parent topic: Modeling processes
What is business activity monitoring?
The concept of Business Activity Monitoring encompasses measuring business performance, monitoring real-time and completed processes, detecting problems in the execution of business processes, diagnosing their root cause, and reporting on business operations to enable cyclical improvements. It helps you to identify business problems, correct exceptions, and change processes to increase business competitiveness by improving process efficiencies. Business Activity Monitoring focuses on business activities.
The aim of Business Activity Monitoring is to ensure that business goals related to revenue, such as expenses, profit, and customer satisfaction are met. It involves ensuring that your business is focused on what is most important, for example, tracking human tasks to ensure that customer orders are processed quickly for your "gold" customers (the business side of service level agreements). Business Activity Monitoring can reactively alert you when any of your business goals are not being met or proactively alert you when they are in danger of not being met.
Business measures, which includes metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), monitor models, monitoring contexts, and KPI contexts are key concepts for modeling, monitoring, analyzing, and improving the performance of your business. These terms are explained in the following paragraphs:
- business measures
Business measures describe the performance management aspects of your business that are required for real-time business monitoring. When you want to monitor a certain area of your business to assess its efficiency, identify problems, and improve performance, you must first determine the performance indicators that will give you the information you need. These performance indicators include metrics, KPIs, counters, and stopwatches.
Evaluating the business measures of your processes is crucial for achieving your business objectives. The values of these business measures can provide extensive information about performance.
- KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable measurements of the improvement or deterioration in the performance of an activity critical to the success of a business. They enable you to measure essential activities of your business so that you can see how these activities influence business results. KPIs differ depending on the business. For example, in a call center, the timely answering of customer calls is a key business activity. A KPI could be Average time for response to a customer call for the last 30 days. This KPI could have a target of less than one minute.
- metrics
A metric is a holder for information, usually a business performance measurement, in a monitoring context. A metric can be used to define the calculation for a key performance indicator (KPI), which measures performance against a business objective. Examples of metrics are the working duration of a process, the name of the user assigned to a task, a supplier’s response time, and the cost of the risk assessment step in an insurance process.
- counters and stopwatches
Counters are specialized metrics that measure the number of occurrences of a situation or keep track of elapsed time. They are defined within the monitor model to track these numbers. For example, a counter could track the number of instances of the order-processing process per day. A stopwatch could track the time since the order-processing process started.
Metrics and KPIs can be partially defined in WebSphere Business Modeler. Metrics, KPIs, counters, and stopwatches are fully defined in the Monitor Model editor. KPIs can then be further defined or created new in the Dashboard. Metrics and KPIs are then evaluated and measured by WebSphere Business Monitor. To compare expected business-performance levels with actual results, WebSphere Business Monitor can export runtime results to WebSphere Business Modeler.
- monitor model
A monitor model is a container that holds information about the business performance management aspects of a business model, including the business measures that are required for monitoring. The WebSphere Business Monitor user decides which processes to monitor, whether to monitor their subprocesses, and what business measures to use. The user creates a monitor model, generates a J2EE application, and deploys the model to WebSphere Business Monitor. The model contains all the defined business measures (metrics, KPIs, counters, and stopwatches) in the process and its subprocesses.
- contexts
Monitor models contain contexts, which define the information to be collected at run time. Each monitor model contains at least one monitoring context. The monitoring context defines all of the information that should be collected about an entity (such as a specific process, the state of a specific customer order, or the stock level of an item in a warehouse) as the system is running. The monitoring context also contains the metrics, counters, and stopwatches for holding the information. KPI contexts are optional. The KPI context defines all of the data that should be collected about a KPI or set of related KPIs. You can nest monitoring contexts, but you cannot nest KPI contexts.
- What can be monitored
A monitoring-enabled application generates a series of events that are carried by the Common Event Infrastructure (CEI). As long as the available events contain the needed data, a monitor model can be created to describe how to monitor the application.
- How monitoring works
Monitor models contain monitoring contexts, which define the set of information to be collected at run time. A monitoring context is created for each real-world object that is monitored. The monitoring context receives the events that report changes in the real-world object, and updates its properties based on information extracted from these events. These properties include business measures, such as metrics, counters, and stopwatches, which describe the performance aspects of a business that are required for real-time business monitoring.
- What are monitor models?
A monitor model describes metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) (collectively called business measures), their dependencies on incoming events, conditions warranting business actions (business situations), and outbound events that report these conditions and might trigger business actions.
- Monitor model versions
In WebSphere Business Monitor, version 6.1.2, multiple versions of a monitor model can be deployed. Versioning refers to the situation where a user modifies aspects of a monitor model to fix problems or make enhancements (adds a metric, monitoring context, and so on) and wants to deploy this new version of the model for future event processing and dashboard reporting, while preserving the data collected from previous model versions.
- What is event sequencing?
WebSphere Business Monitor is not limited to the creationTime time stamp when sequencing events. When you explicitly enable event sequencing for a monitor model, it can enforce the sequencing as defined in the monitor model by allowing you to specify any field in the common base event for use in sequencing.
Parent topic: Introduction to WebSphere Business Monitor
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