Big Data 101: How to Successfully Manage

Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity with

www.brightgauge.com

About BrightGauge

What Is Big Data?

Volume

Velocity

Variety

Veracity

Wrapping Up The 4 Dimensions of Big Data

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Table of Contents

I t 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.

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About BrightGauge

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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.

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.

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Volume

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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.

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Velocity

Each customer submits tickets which, when used properly, can provide valuable insights

into their satisfaction, any strategic issues, or immediate challenges. When feedback is produced quickly and effectively, your management team not only stays ahead of any problems, but also starts identifying any trend 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. Additionally, identifying the types of tickets submitted can help your management team identify any issues and craft any solutions well before they become institutional or organizational problems.

The key to managing the Velocity component of 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.

An inability to sort data that

comes in at high velocities can

lead to delayed decision-making

and missed opportunities. That’s

why BrightGauge makes that

data available to users in real-

time through integrations like

ConnectWise, Zendesk, Datto,

LabTech, Kaseya, and many

more. When you have all of

your data from multiple sources

in one place, it’s easy to make

informed business decisions

without toggling through

multiple platforms.

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.

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.

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Variety

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.

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 occasions when BrightGauge is showing a different number than ConnectWise for our main service board. After investigating, we discovered that these tickets go to our “catch all” mail connector and they can’t display on our Service board view until we move them to 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 email. 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.

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.

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Veracity

BrightGauge makes data

accuracy analysis simple. Our

dashboards and reports make it

easy to recognize when you have

bad data affecting your results.

In fact, we recently published

a case study with CadreNet’s

Richard Trivedi, who discovered

that the company was losing out

on 10% of billable tickets prior to

using the BrightGauge platform.

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.

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Wrapping Up The 4 Dimensions of Big Data

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