Technology and information have become so important to how companies operate that even small changes can significantly affect their ability to manage business performance.

However, if IT is spending all of its time and resources meeting service commitments, it's impossible to support more strategic opportunities. As such, any means to cut the time and effort to administer enterprise applications becomes a strategic gain.

IT managers need to be proactive and drive continuous improvement in their business intelligence (BI) operations. IT can address the five key steps to better BI system management by using task-oriented system monitoring capabilities:

1. Understand usage patterns

Usage patterns tell you a lot about how an organization gathers, reviews, and distributes information. Some patterns are more obvious: quarter-end and year-end typically generate extra system activity. Others vary depending on the industry or company culture. To understand usage patterns, you need to know the number of users that access the system at a given period of time. You also need to know where these users are located, how they use the system, and how much time they spend on it. Certain metrics can help. They provide a good indication of system usage and how well the application is adapting to the people who use it:

• Number of unique logons. While this metric doesn't tell you how the business is using the system, it definitely indicates how many people are accessing it.
• Number of processed requests. Processed requests indicate magnitude in terms of system usage. This metric is also useful for things like when to schedule batch reports.
• Number of queued requests. A high number may indicate a lot of system activity at one time, or an issue that has to be addressed.
• Longest time in queue. This is useful for monitoring changes on a regular basis. If queue times increase over a short period, there may be an issue that requires further investigation.

2. Understand the BI environment

Organizations use different deployment options based on preferred IT infrastructure and enterprise architecture strategy.