Any IT function consists of just three things - People, Process, and Product – and at ExtraQuest we have built our company around maximizing the effectiveness of each of these three fundamental entities.
But you’re not interested in how we’re structured internally, you’re interested in how we help you benefit from what ExtraQuest has to offer. So in this edition of DataBuzz, we’re going focus on what we do to ensure service excellence.
Let’s start with People. What is the profile of the sort of person needed to provide the best skills in database administration? In this issue we have a profile one of our expert DBAs that gives you some idea of the qualifications and abilities needed to make sure that databases are always running at peak efficiency and that potential problems are addressed before they become noticeable.
For Process, we’re going to dive deeper into the methodologies that we follow to ensure that the right thing is always done at the right time in the right way. We don’t follow industry standards because they look good on paper – we follow them because they enable us constantly to improve the operational performance of the databases in your environments. And better database performance means better response times, better use of resources, and a more efficient business.
Product is an area where service providers can achieve real differentiation in the market, so we’re going to tell you more about the way we use our own technology to maintain a living “brain” of DBA knowledge. And it’s that brain which enables us to dig deeper into the art of database administration and apply skills, which collectively have been hundreds of person years in the making.
Each of these areas is key to service excellence.
We will also be talking about how the market is changing as companies move towards getting the best possible service in niche areas, rather than accepting the “one size fits all” approach that has been prevalent in the past.
Last, but not least, to show how service excellence works in practice, Venkat answers one of your questions: “what differentiates service providers?”.
Enjoy this latest edition of DataBuzz!
Thor Culverhouse
CEO
At 8 years-old she wanted to program robots. Now, she is a RoboDOC expert. ExtraQuest’s black belt DBA, Julie Johnson, took a circuitous route to get here, but we’re sure glad she did as she is one of a team who makes it possible for us to guarantee you service excellence.
Last month, Venkat extolled the virtues of expert DBAs who automate mundane tasks so that they can free up their time for more creative tasks. Well, Julie even filters her emails with automatic rules so that she need only spend about half an hour to get through more than 500 awaiting her every morning. She can then spend time being proactive and creating automated reporting scripts for push button execution. Julie’s major clients no longer need to worry about their tablespaces being stretched to the limit and knocking them over, Julie is automating data file additions.
Julie says: “there’s some things you can learn, and some that only comes from experience.” DBAs at ExtraQuest get breadth and depth. “We have so much exposure to so many environments – from Oracle 8i to 10g, RAC implementations, online transaction processing, and data warehousing systems. We see it all,” she says. That gives Julie personal and professional advantages. “We learn so much everyday. Working in a large team, we glean knowledge from each other. If there were only 2 or 3 of us we wouldn’t generate new knowledge, we’d have to search for it.” Not only that, because the team works so closely together, documents everything and has a change control system, when Julie is on vacation, anyone in the team in India or USA can manage her clients expertly.
Proactivity could be Julie’s middle name. She learned database administration on her own by reading documents when she was a software instructor. “I spent four solid months getting into Oracle. There are always caveats and exceptions to the rules and I learned that through experience.” If she comes across something new, she knows she can get an answer on the Internet or at Oracle MetaLink. Julie says that the team at ExtraQuest “want to crack it, are persistent, resourceful people.” She says “we need a sense of humor because it can be like a pressure cooker. DBAs have a notorious reputation for being arrogant and cocky, but not here, we are amicable and share knowledge.”
Julie learned about web development in Japan when she was there teaching English. “there were no books in English so I ordered IT books from Amazon at $500 a shipment and learned on my own,” she says.
But Julie’s childhood wish to program robots was not something she automated. She took a degree in German and spent a year at University in Germany; was a ski bum for a couple of years, and went to Japan for fun. Ever innovative, rather than use her one-way ticket home from Japan, she came back via Tokyo, Hong Kong, China, Mongolia, Russia, and Europe. An intrepid traveler, energetic mountain biker, and busy mother of two daughters, Julie lives life and work to the full. “Things get messy with children and databases, but there’s great rewards in the end,” she chuckles.
Alison J. Macmillan
DataBuzz Editor
Your users want a great service. You can give them this if you can quickly find the rogue issues causing problems and fix them fast. On March 28, 1979, the maintenance crew at Three Mile Island was renewing resin used in water treatment. On two occasions before this, they had made a mistake, which caused water to enter an air circuit. This mistake happened again. This time, however, the ensuing sequence of events made history.
The automatic safety procedures were in place to fix the problems fast. It took time for the crew to notice warning lights on a control panel, but when they did they acted on them. A malfunction in a relief valve went unnoticed for two and a half hours. Almost the same thing had happened at the Davis-Besse plant near Toleda, Ohio – but they noticed the problem in only 20 minutes and they thwarted a catastrophe.
Three mile island had not put preventive measures in place to fix the root cause. Intelligence from Ohio had been gathered – and then rested in a repository rather than shared and acted upon. This was not just unlucky third time round fire fighting, it was disastrous.
OK, when your clients’ databases have problems, such a disastrous chain of events may be unlikely, but if we do not focus on the root cause of the issue at hand, and build in greater intelligence into the process of fixing issues then they are liable to recur, and more time and money will be lost fighting the same fires over and over, and providing service excellence will be a mere buzzword.
Using ITIL as a backdrop and process guide, there are two processes that work in concert to support a service excellence approach: Incident Management and Problem Management.
Incident Management is the process of using tools and skills to ensure that when something breaks, it is fixed immediately. Our DBAs use RoboDoc to fix your issues, but it doesn’t stop there. Our DBAs communicate with you and follow up to ensure that service is restored. This helps relieve the immediate pain but does not necessarily, by itself, address the core problem that occurred. By itself, this process would allow the problem to occur once again.
Problem Management is the process of deeper inspection into the root cause of issues to break through symptoms and understand exactly what happened. Data collection and correlation are critical to begin the problem management process. With the data, control charts and pareto charts are used to represent graphically what is occurring with the application, system, database, or network that caused the issue. By using graphical representation of the causes of an issue and continuously asking the question “Why?”, we are able to break through symptoms and determine root cause This is an example of how Six Sigma processes are used to create very dependable, repeatable processes.
At ExtraQuest, we don’t follow these industry standards because they look good on paper, we follow them because they enable us constantly to improve the operational performance of your databases. We can clearly show that better database performance means better response times, better use of resources, and a more efficient business for our customers This is core to our model of service excellence.
Matt Wilkinson
VP Worldwide Services
Dancer, Isadora Duncan once wrote to George Bernard Shaw enthusing that they should have a child together.
"Think of it!" she said. "With my body and your brains, what a wonder it would be."
“Yes,” replied Shaw. “But what if it had my body and your brains?”
The ExtraQuest Managed Service offering has some of the brainiest DBAs in the world who also stretch their brawn 24x7, 365 days per year to support ExtraQuest’s client’s databases. And at the heart of the ExtraQuest service offering is a very special software system, developed by ExtraQuest, called RoboDOC (Robotized Database Operations Center). Our DBAs use RoboDOC, installed on your site, to monitor and administer your databases. RoboDOC’s brain maintains a repository of historical information that we use to be more effective and efficient in managing your data assets. RoboDOC is both brain and brawn as it is constantly watching over your databases, remembering what it observes, and enabling it to take or recommend actions based on a wealth of prior experience. The coupling of our brains and brawns produces service excellence for you.
How do our DBAs tap into RoboDOC’s genes to be so effective and efficient? RoboDOC never stops monitoring each and every database in your environment. If it senses something amiss, it immediately generates a ticket, of appropriate priority, to alert our DBAs. Our DBAs answer RoboDOC’s call as a priority and together they track all activities needing attention. RoboDOC’s monitoring and ticketing generates a wealth of information and knowledge that is retained in its central nervous system, effectively encompassing a mini-history of your environment, its issues, and their resolutions. Using this super-brain of information enables DBAs in our Managed Services organization to be highly effective and, in most cases, exceed your service expectations.
Another key feature of RoboDOC is its intelligent reporting. Built on top of our DBA’s years of experience, RoboDOC’s reports represent an insight and knowledge that is not commonly found elsewhere. For example, our HealthCheck report provides a comprehensive and understandable view of the health of a data environment; and our User Irritation Quantification Report is unique in the marketplace. Coupling these reports with the historical intelligence gives our DBAs predictive analytic capabilities that are otherwise not possible.
It’s a likely bet that your organization has a proliferation of different databases and techniques for managing those databases (and exceedingly high costs associated with DBA staffing). That’s where RoboDOC really shines via its SOP (standard operating procedure) mechanism.
Three important components make up RoboDOC’s SOPs: documentation defining the procedure; workflows and scripts, which automate the procedure; and an expert rules engine that triggers the automation. Virtually anyone can apply these business best practices, resulting in significant operational efficiencies for you.
For the most part, our Managed Services customers have very little to do with RoboDOC – you are simply aware of the benefits it provides in enabling you, for example, to get regular reports on the health of your databases, to observe how issues are addressed before they become major problems, to have databases which are always up rather than down, and generally to see issues being fixed fast and once and for all. Our clients call this superior service.
The benefits of RoboDOC can be applied to any organization, who must manage their valuable data assets, and not just through Managed Services. With this in mind, we will be making exciting announcements in relation to RoboDOC in July, and I’m looking forward to telling you about them in the next edition of DataBuzz.
Ron Krubeck is the VP of Engineering at ExtraQuest, and is responsible for the development of RoboDOC.
Outsourcing isn’t a new concept; it’s just a new term. When the British Empire was in full swing back in the nineteenth century, functions were “outsourced” to overseas colonies because it was cheaper to perform them there than back in the UK. Jobs such as growing crops and making garments were “sent overseas”, or “outsourced” as we would say today.
In the 1960s, cars were being produced much more cheaply in Japan than they were in the US or Europe, which is what enabled the Japanese motor companies to get a foothold in these markets. Many Americans “outsourced” their car purchases to Japan, and then to the other Asian countries that followed suit and produced even cheaper cars than prosperous nations could build.
As management gurus like Prahalad and Hamel extolled the strategic advantages of building core competencies to gain sustainable competitive advantage, comnpanies focused on their core mission, partnering with other organizations that focused on theirs – e.g. HRM, finance, widget making, storage, transportation, and IT.
But outsourcing has its limits. Sometimes the RE-source that is being OUT-sourced becomes just as expensive as it would be to do it yourself. And who thinks of Japanese cars as being “cheap” any more? They have moved their focus to the quality markets (Lexus, Acura, Infiniti), and to key growth markets, such as eco-friendly cars (the Prius et al).
In the IT services industry, we’ve also seen the rush to overseas to find cheaper prices, and although cost savings will always be a factor in selecting an outsourcing alternative, organizations clearly understand that, at the end of the day, “you get what you pay for”. As companies try to improve every part of their operation, they are now more carefully picking and choosing the areas they want to outsource, and they are also being more diligent about who they outsource to. An outsourcing company that’s something of a “Jack and Jill of all trades”, may be able to meet a wide range of requirements, but will probably only offer mediocre services – generally speaking, the wider the range of talent, the less the depth of expertise in any given area.
Recent analyst pronouncements have claimed that we are past the era of the “outsourcing megadeal”. Companies have had their fingers burnt by outsourcing all or large parts of their IT operations to large managed services organizations, only to find that the skills in these organizations, although good on the whole, are lacking in key areas where high levels of expertise are simply essential.
Database administration is one such area. There are so many variables involved in the effective administration of databases that ‘body shops’ are seldom capable of providing an adequate service. Database environments are constantly changing. Database versions change, patches need to be applied, data files need to be added, backups and restores are constantly taking place, new applications come on line and new data feeds are always being added. Only a service that has built a core competence that can tune into the intrinsic DNA of the organization can hope to keep track of the constant environmental changes that render yesterday’s situation as stale as yesterday’s news. Read the brain behind the brawn for more on this.
When you’re considering outsourcing your database administration, think Lexus or Mercedes – go for a specialist – it might be made elsewhere, but the quality is of the highest.
Dr. Brian Staff
VP Marketing
Venkat, "What Differentiates Service Providers?"
"That is the million dollar question in the IT services industry, isn’t it? The industry is rife with suppliers, including body shops and assorted fly-by-night operators, thriving in confusing messaging. These providers are an anathema to reliable services delivery. Most of them have a single, rather negligible, value proposition: providing labor at low hourly rates.
How can you tell if the outsourcer you are considering will give you service excellence? I’ll give you the short answer here, but you can read my article on the subject on our website.
Often you look at what the vendor says differentiates them from others. But if you want to avoid an unhappy marriage followed by a quick divorce you need to be able to recognize what a differentiator is. Be wary of vague and subjective statements. A differentiator can be measured. If you see statements such as “our customers love us”, “we will take good care of you”, “our technology is better”, then look for the proof. You will know if a company is positively differentiated when you see a “because …” with their statements. They describe exactly why they are better by explaining each facet of their delivery model and the resultant value for customers.
If the supplier says that the service you want is one of their core competencies, then be aware that in this industry a core competence depends on having good people with that domain knowledge. Can they recruit such specialists, and keep them, and what happens when those employees leave?
You might think bigger and seasoned are better. But where will you fit in their overall scheme of things? Big does not necessarily mean indestructible – look at what happened to the energy and telecom behemoths at the beginning of the decade. Similarly, business longevity is also not a differentiator. It is very much possible to eke out a mediocre existence for years and years.
You may be beguiled by vendors who use sophisticated technology to automate their processes or say they are highly innovative. But it’s level of service you want – technology itself doesn’t guarantee quality, and there has only been negligible innovativeness in the services industry anyway.
A reliable supplier is a metrics-driven supplier. When such a vendor evaluates your business initially, they will produce a quantitative Service Level Agreement (SLA) based on an analysis of where you are starting from and where you want to get. All future work is measured from your baseline, rather than ‘figured out’ as you jolly along. Recommendations from evaluation will make their way into a formal project plan listing specific client and supplier personnel responsible for working on it, along with task dates and dependencies. As the plan is executed and solutions implemented, together you will compare results against the starting point to demonstrate quantifiable improvement. It doesn’t stop there. Once the environment is stabilized, a new baseline needs to be established. The right monitoring tools need to be implemented to assess the ongoing state of the environment, any deviations from the SLA need to be dealt with, and dealt with proactively before they cause any business interruption.
When you’re looking for a metrics-driven vendor you need to ask the right questions to evaluate how they measure up. There’s more about this in my article. If you would like to discuss this further, then please contact me by phone or email."
Venkat S. Devraj
Chief Architect
Do you have a burning question you would like answered in next month’s DataBuzz? Please contact our editor, Alison J. Macmillan
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