PurePerformance - Observability Evolution: From Sys Admin to Digital Readiness Manager with Mark Forrester

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

Do you know why customers spend more money at a pub when ordering at a table vs ordering directly from at the bar tender? Do you want to know how to get SaaS vendors to send you their observability & telemetry data? Do you want to know the career path of how an Infrastructure Analyst turned Digitial Readiness Manager?Tune in to this PurePerformance episode where we sat down with Mark Forrester from Mitchell & Butlers answering all these questions and also drawing the parallels to Observability. Because observability has come a long way just as Mark: From traditional infrastructure (CPU, Memory, Network) to APM (Service Response Time & Failure Rates), to Real User Behaviour and now End-2-End Business Processes Analytics. Unlocking the potential of Digitial Business Observability lets Mark optimize the end-2-end customer journey to make sure their customers always feel like they are taken care of when trying to order online food delivery, a meal or a drink at a restaurant. As you learn, digital business observability goes beyond your own digital premise and needs to tap into the data of your 3rd party suppliers and SaaS vendors.To see more from Mark also check out his interview at Dynatrace Perform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGpduOrPxpU

It's time for Pure Performance! Get your stopwatches ready, it's time for Pure Performance with Andy Grabner and Brian Wilson. Welcome everyone to another episode of Pure Performance. I guess you guessed right. This is not the voice of Brian Wilson, but maybe he actually did an intro. Unfortunately today, well, fortunately for me, because I have exclusive time with our guest today, normally I have Brian Wilson with me doing this podcast. He typically comes up with a great joke or a strange story in the beginning about some of his latest dreams that he had. Today, we'll skip all of this

because we have an exciting topic, a little bit of an unusual topic maybe for us or a new topic. My guest today is Mark Forrester. If I look at his LinkedIn page, it says Digital Readiness Manager. And if I keep reading, it says BizOps, taking digital initiatives from design to be a use support. There's a lot of things in here that I want to ask Mark. Before I ask him all these questions, I actually want to welcome Mark to the show. Mark, thank you so much for being here. Do me a favor. Can you quickly introduce yourself to the show. Mark, thank you so much for being here. Do me a favor.

Can you quickly introduce yourself to the audience? Yeah, I mean, I'm Mark Forrester. You've already given my job title away. Digital Readiness Manager at Mitchells & Butlers, one of the UK's largest restaurant companies, over 1,700,000 restaurants that we deal with. But yeah, so my role, the title doesn't really explain it very well. But yeah, so it's probably a transition manager on steroids,

blended across all different departments, delivery and things like that. So yeah, so as we chat a bit further, we'll probably unearth a lot of what I do and how I interact with different parts of the business to make sure what we do develop is supportable and manageable once it gets into BAU. Yeah. Hey, every time I talk to you and I know you have given different presentations, it's always exciting for many people because the business you're working in, you mentioned this restaurant and pubs in the UK. A lot of people probably like to spend time in the pub, have a pint or five or ten,

however else there is, how many else they have um but it's it's really exciting to see that this business right the whole restaurant business the whole food delivery and everything has been transformed digitally especially during covet uh was this a challenging time for you kind of reflecting a little bit what happened in the last three years um so as a business we thankfully already already, he says, looking back, made that decision to start driving the digital channels, especially order at table. You walk in, you find an empty table, you get your table number,

you get your menu up on your phone, and you basically just order it while you're sat there, pay for it online, and it just arrives to your table. That's the concept, obviously. You'll find those services in other places and other things, but it was fundamentally groundbreaking back then for a bar and restaurant company to do those features. But then COVID landed, the UK government had different rule sets. So when we began to open back up after the first wave,

there were strict rules about social distancing. So therefore, you had to use order at table. So we were already ahead of the game. The pinch point there was we had to mass scale it across all of our brands. So you bear in mind, we have 18 brands in the UK. We're not a single entity. So Mitchells and Butlers, if you say that name to somebody in the UK, probably won't understand who that is.

But if you talk to them about Miller and Carter, the Steakhouse, Brown's Brasseries, Toby Carvery, the home of the British Roast Dinner and all of those other brands that we have, basically had to have those services enabled on tap at the drop of a hat, basically. So that made it challenging to scale and to be able to do that you know expedited speed and and then obviously there was a massive explosion then into people didn't want to go out people didn't want to socialize so that caused the delivery market to explode and if we've already got a kitchen that's certified and running and we've got a chef then why shouldn't we be able to take you know uh food and drink beyond the traditional bricks and mortar of the building and take it out to the guests so we obviously then

ventured out and started pushing hard into that delivery sphere and and obviously doing just uber eats and delivery deliveries from our outlets into customers houses basically so we we burst that the ring fence that was the bricks and mortar of the actual building and said you know what we've got the facilities that let's push it and then let's drive it and let's drive the revenue growth and and today you know exponentially we still do that and we explore different ways to you know get that i think one of the stats we do publish is that the order at table journey because we remove the friction of fighting at the bar um trying to get to the front and getting your front spare so then obviously the waiter or waitress will say to

you what do you want to drink and then you're like oh i'll just have one of those because you're then in a panic because you've got loads of people staring at you like come on i want to i want my drink so what order at table actually does is take all of that friction away gives that time back to the customer and they make more informed choices and they naturally upsell themselves so as an example my wife painfully will take me to an outlet and i'll use the digital services obviously because we implement them and and she will order a gin and tonic but because she now has the time she will order a more flavored gin or exotic gin and obviously a flavored tonic to go with it which obviously is more expensive which drives revenue growth for basically just offering a digital channel yeah and and for me this is

fascinating it's the second time or i hear the story now from you and i actually kept repeating the story to some people that i met because for me, it's fascinating. It's something that I think everybody understands, the situation that you just explained. You get to a bar, you have to wait in line, and all of a sudden you have to make a split-second decision. You already forgot what your friends ordered because obviously our brains are not trained to keep five drinks in our brain for a minute or two. But I really think what you said is interesting. You're making more informed decisions because you have all of the time that you need to make a decision. You have all the details of the products that are available to you in your hand, in your pocket, in your hand,

and can then make an informed decision. And this leads to more business. And I think this is just phenomenal to think about this now what i did not know but as you explained it that um obviously back in the beginning of the pandemic after the first wave when we were allowed to go back to pubs but we had these these rules of you know like having the the social distancing in the restaurants and i i guess that i'm because i'm not working in the restaurant business i wasn't aware that obviously ordering at the table was obviously one way to enforce the rule to stay kind of separated as good as possible and you were already ahead of the game because you

had these things uh there how challenging was it to roll this out uh some brands easier than others so we have a concept which we call hard and soft brands. So a hard brand is Miller & Carter, which has got multiple entities, but they're all marketed under the same domain in effect. So flip that, and this is where Dynatrace comes in. We have another brand, which is Premium Country Pubs. Each outlet has its own domain. So we create an application that has like 160 domains in it

because each individual outlet in that brand. So that's where it becomes more complicated because of the way that we obviously architected that. So that's where we felt more of a pinch point of trying to deliver it. But, you know, the needs must, we had to do it. Limited resources, you know, we were still, obviously UK government were helping businesses but we didn't have shall we say the full team back working um but you know

we got there so it was challenging dantres helps we understood where the pinch points was you know when we did an additional brand where we had load you know and yes we we had successes and we also had some issues, like I say, pinch points, but, you know, the beauty was that we were always comfortable that Davis AI will always be there and be going, right, okay, so, you know, it's not the web front end this time. We've now overloaded the API and it's not scaled to size, you know, it's not coping fast enough with the increase in demand and, you know, you roll that out and you come out of COVID

and out the other side. And then we had the World Cup, Football World Cup, you know, and we were sat, you know, energised, ready and had no blips at all because, you know, history taught us we know what the load would do. We know how to compensate for that load and we know how to deliver it. But not only do we have order at table we have the delivery partners we have click and collect where you order it online and collect it and so we have own channel delivery now where you order it online on our site and we use a third party delivery

company to deliver it to your door because then we don't have to pay as much revenue to our delivery partners because they take a cut obviously so it's about building those streams of going right okay we've got delivery partners customers buy into that but if we can get them into our implementation, there's less overhead costs for us because it's on our platform. So we're looking to branch that out. There's so many different things in the spokes that we're doing now, and it all boils down to digitalization of that customer and where possible converting that journey digitally to get the insight you know we're doing things with biz events where we're training an ai with so you put a burger in your basket and they'll go hey do you want a drink with that we're using biz events we're going to cap we're capturing what people want and what people select and then

we then push that back up into the ai to start training it. So each brand would have a more responsive AI to what customers of that brand normally would select when we ask a question. And it's about, you know, drive that basket value. So there's lots and lots of busy things going on in my world. And we have to correlate all that because obviously it's great because the customers love it and the customers use it. But when it goes wrong, there's a lot of touch points and it's a you know

cloud ready and all of those different words that danis would use it's it's a minefield because i showed it perform that you know our our front end web platform is developed by you know that's they're called supplier a the tool system the pause is supplier B. The API layer is actually supplier C. And we're sat in the middle going, well, who's at fault here? You know, and then that was always the challenge. And this is one of the things that we now use Dynatrace to surface that data. We blend RUM data now. We use BizEvents.

I think, you know, like it's going out of fashion at the moment. It's our new toy with so much power. So today I was talking to somebody in data trades because we found we enabled biz events on a journey. So we, for example, the delivery partner, we get an error coming back all the time, which is an item is out of stock. So we know that when they mark an item out of stock saying, I don't know, I've got no fish left. So the outlet is out of stock so we know that the when they mark an item out of stock saying

i don't know i've got no fish left so the outlet market out of stock that has to sink through the pause through the api layer to a sas provider who then integrates it with our delivery partners to get it offline on i don't know just eat for example we know that customers will still place orders and then the pause will the point of sale will reject that because it can't auto-inject because that item's out of stock now. We know that journey's failed. We now implement, so from biz events, we know that's failed. So we now implemented biz events on the full touchpoint.

It's where we see the out-of-stock come through from the POS, where that gets transformed into a notification for our third-party SaaS supplier. Now, when I say SaaS supplier, bear in mind that in a normal world, it would end there because it's SaaS and most suppliers will say no. We bought it, got our SaaS supplier to buy in to say, hey, guess what? If you tell us what's happening inside your world, then we're not going to log as many tickets because we'll know what happened to that order.

So it helps you help us. So if we've got all the data, we don't need to disturb you. So you get less instant tickets from us because otherwise you're a black box, you're getting everything. So they said, oh, okay, let's see how this works. So we gave them an API key for Dynatrace so they could push in biz events. So when they receive that out-of-stock notification, they send us in a biz event. And then when they push it to the third-party supplier with success or failure, they send us a biz event. So simple for them to implement. It's just a cloud event, push it in. Everyone can read that online. But what that's done is allowed us to use business flow to link it together, four stages with a correlation ID.

And then straight away within six hours yesterday, I went straight back to our API and said, hey, guys, why does it take 15 minutes from notification to even generate an external notification? So within six hours, BizFlow tells us that that's where the initial finding is. That's where the pinch point is at lunchtime when they're all marking their items out of stock. Over 1,700 restaurants, that's a lot of items. So when they change the settings, and obviously they could mark something back in stock

as well as out of stock, that process was taking 15 minutes. And in that 15-minute window, we were out of sync with our delivery partners. So this morning, we've come back, we've got a plan. It's in the dev backlog so within yeah so within six hours of implementing that showed us what we can do with business events and business flow we've got the first iteration of improving the guest journey

improving the experience and reducing the errors therefore driving revenue less people having to order so that's less manpower required etc etc so that's how we use dynatrace we're very dem centric and customer journey centric yeah well i mean this i had to take some notes and there's so many things that you just mentioned first of all you are in a situation like i think many that listen in that means you are not a classical software house you're not a classical software vendor but you obviously software powers your business, but you are depending on one, two, three, or four different other vendors. And what I thought was really interesting, what you mentioned is many SaaS vendors, when you call their API, they don't want to give you insights in what's happening, right? Because they say, hey, this is

my business, you pay for it, but I don't give you telemetry data, observability data. You convince them on the argument that if we know what's going on inside your system then we can troubleshoot on our own and not ask you and open up a ticket and basically be a pain in the butt to actually them to troubleshooting yeah so so in essence it would they would have um it would have ended up where they would have had death by tickets, as I call it. So basically, it would have been a surge of tickets because we know through history, going down this process that we've had before and the previous vendor then opened up an API

gateway and we were querying that from things. But ultimately, we knew from experience that it would be a death by a thousand cuts because they would literally get ticket after ticket because once it enters their world we don't know so we go well this order failed well you know actually what they're sending us is well we failed to inject your order but it's your fault because you're out of stock of an item yeah now that's not for them to fix that and that's where the collaboration comes, you know, and they've seen the power of this now. So we do it for after stocks.

We do it for when we're syncing the menus now through them to the third parties. We do it for obviously orders where we can see where orders are failing and they tell us why it failed. And even if it fails inside their infrastructure, they will tell us that. And we can simply, you know, use BizEvents. There's a simple dashboard and even

ironically someone used to do it in the excel spreadsheet and now we just have it on the down trace dashboard which calculates the failure percentages by supplier and overall and they don't even have to do anything they just open it up set the timeline and it gives them the answer they're looking for for their reports you know it's there so you know that's the power of the biz events that we've got all of that and then obviously linking that into the business flow um allows you to see the timings between each step and then that's where we highlighted we've well hang on a second we know that the first stage is always going to be the trickiest and the longest of process but i don't think anybody realized it was 15 minutes and to personally to for our business to have got a of our suppliers and a SaaS supplier to come together to amalgamate all of that data, to do the timelines, to then figure out actually it's became clear straight away and that was the power of Braille,

you know, and et cetera, that it can do those kind of queries and crunch that information. And yeah, straight away, we were onto that. And then obviously, what we'll drive into next is looking at the drops

and see where in that stage are we losing tickets and for what reason, or sorry, outstocks and for what reason. So, you know, we will then granularulize that down and if we need to insert another business event in that step to try and get further into it that's

what we're doing everyone's bought into it you know it's the it's the major reason of why delivery partners orders don't auto inject is the out of stock issue so this slicker we can make that the better and now we've got the oversight we've got the metrics and the feedback to the down trace team there of uh actually would it would be great if now i've got my business flow can i turn that into a metric can i turn that into an slo so that we can say actually an out of stock should take no longer than three minutes and when it does then we should be flagging that and from a metric i can create a problem record so it's it's you know driving that enhancement and using biz flow data to you to capture more information and respond to it.

And then ideally, if you think further, you should be able to do some predictive analysis here. And you should say, hey, we are probably running out of stock on this item because it's so popular today. Start restocking it or whatever. I mean, that sounds like the next big thing. If only.

I mean, it's got to go to a supplier in a long reason. Unless we've got into the world of drones and they're shipping fish. Yeah, I understand. And refrigerated containers. It's a bit tricky. But in principle, it's there. And, you know, there are a lot of things that we can enhance and drive. And, you know, like I say, the AI, if we know we're running low on fish,

then should we start suggesting different things to customers? Different items, yeah, of course. We know we haven't got fish and chips, but we've got, I don't know, a trout. Should we then go, oh, sorry, we haven't got fish and chips. We've got this other fish and basically just, you know, ease the customer into that other side of the journey. It's all about, you know, not forcing the customer, but finding that right balance of not so they feel like, you know,

we're dictating to them what they want, but at the same time, if we haven't got something they want but we've got something else, then it makes logical sense of saying, really sorry, but what about this or what about that instead? So, yeah, so it's a very busy day from day to day, trying to orchestrate all of that, link it back to what's in the pipeline, different services that we're offering. So, you know, one of our new features that's coming through recently or going to come through shortly should i say

is um that good old thing you go to a restaurant you've had your food you just want to pay you just want to leave and so you know but how many times have you sat there trying to get somebody's attention so we we're going to introduce the ability of pay at table. So basically you get your bill from the waiter or waitress. It'll have your table number on. You just go on the app, put in your table number, and it'll call you over the internet. Basically contact the outlet, get your bill,

and you can split it and pay in multiple segments. But basically you just pay it on your phone and you can leave. You don't need to see a waiter or waitress to finish the journey off. You can even tip on it if you want to. So it's about taking all of that friction away where it slows customers down and they get frustration and take them out and digitize them. So for me, what's fascinating, we've been talking about 20 minutes now and I know you are deep into observability, but when we talk about observability in the past, we talked about CPU, memory, garbage collection.

We talked about failure rates. We talked about very technical observability metrics. You, however, in the last 20 minutes, you never used the word CPU. You never used any of these, let's say, classical terms because you have completely brought observability into the business space, right? And I know you mentioned busy events. A lot of folks that are listening in, busy events is one of the ways in Dynatrace to actually extract. It's called busy events, but technically it's not kind of just bound to business data. But ideally, what people do like you, right? You are ingesting business data from API calls,

from external systems, from your own systems that you run, and then you can run analytics on top of it. So coming back to the initial question that I had, so digital readiness manager, if I listen to what you just said, for me, it sounds like you are kind of the, I'm not sure what the right term is for this, but you are really understanding the end-to-end

business process in your organization, in your business. And then you try to make it observable from a business perspective, end-to-end with all of the different vendors and places and suppliers involved. And then use this data to make suggestions for improvements, right? And supportability. And supportability, yeah. Yeah, so the product owner will want, like you say, so the product owner will come and say,

this is our new initiative. And then I will, like you say, analyze that end-to-end. So what are we going to get from Dem? What are we going to get from BizEvents now? How are we going to capture? and then obviously they will have reporting requirements that they would want to see in relation to conversion rates and all of those wonderful things um so some of that comes out of dynachess etc and sales numbers to an extent as because obviously that we see the transactions going through from the web portal but we wouldn't see refunds so it's um unreconciled

data we call it internally so we don't use it for sales reporting obviously because that's the financial system but it gives us that near snapshot near to the second of what's going on so we take all those reporting requirements but what i do is the reporting requirements that a product owner wants about usually successes, if I'm brutally honest. They want to see all the good data to PR, how great this implementation is. But the flip side of that is the bad data or the failures, and that's what the support teams want.

So basically, in the same time, I sit in that gap in between the gray area, whatever you want to call it, and I flip it both ways. So we provide to the product owners the good data. So they'll say, well, how many transactions fail? We're successful and I'm great. But when we say for support, I go, right, this is how you're going to get your data for when it fails. And this is the reason why it's failing.

So when I orchestrate a lot of the business events and session metrics and things, it's about tying the two together in the one journey so that we're not coming back and trying to reiterate stuff further down the pipeline because it's always a challenge to get, so we say non-functional things in afterwards because they want to drive the initiatives, not for the support side. So we blend that together to create that simplistic view, and we just do it in one hit so that everybody gets what they need to be able to decipher what's going on so support can understand what's talking to what, when it fails, how do I understand what that is,

where is the basket, where can I see if it's a payment failure, what was the reason for the failure. All of that gets pulled out and dissected at that stage so that when we deliver the product, if it failed immediately, support would understand exactly what's going on. So that's the challenge that I have almost every week to try and dissect all of that.

Yeah. What would you say, looking at, it's always great to be proud of successes, but it's great to learn from failures and improve. If you look at, let's say, things that don't go right in an order, what do you see? What's the percentage of a technical problem? You know, maybe, I don't know, really, do you have an issue in your cloud environment?

There's connectivity issues. So what's the percentage of technical problems versus more business problems, like what you mentioned earlier, out of stock, or anything else that could go wrong in the business process, but not from a technical perspective, but more from something that you don't have under control

that's not technically related? So, there are more business problems than technical problems, if I'm honest. Technical problems because we've got segmented suppliers, in effect. They're all very good at their own little segments. We get technical problems where one supplier hasn't spoken to the other

and there's been a change to the API and the front end hasn't expected that and obviously you get that failure. But then, you know, Davis is great at flagging that straight away. You're onto it in a flash. That problem record comes up very quickly, job done. And I think that's the beauty that the Davis AI means that the technical problems are run very, very quickly. The hard ones to get your head around is like this after stock thing

where, you know, someone's flagging it. It's not really an end-to-end flow. there's no direct calls between it because it's traversing through many systems and many platforms you know now we've been able to link that together so that's where we find the challenges and not only that it's we will implement so um i don't know whether the people will feel the same sometimes we have that element where we will so we say contractual slas don't know whether the people will feel the same. Sometimes we have that element where we will, so we say contractual SLAs don't align. It seems so illogical when you've got, you know, we implemented a new integration from one of the, you know,

the data platform and there was no out of our support on that platform because before it wasn't digital centric and all of a sudden it's now got sucked into this digital centric world. if someone makes a change it's near real time data changes within the api layer so that feeds everything else so we've taken it from this oh it just sits over there and you change it and you've got batch processing nightly and you can kind of work with that so now it's near real time and the SLAs around that application and the supportability of that application from that team is not customer-centric, is not digital-centric, and that's then a business challenge that we have to overcome,

understand what they are and understand what's going on and how we can resolve those. So they are the kind of, shall we say, you know, biz ops kind of issues more than DevOps issues issues that we have so that if i understand this correctly components that before the digital transformation had a different role and a different requirement and a different a different criticality all of a sudden became extremely critical because they're powering everything and if you don't have a the right setup for this right if it's if resiliency or slas were never that critical and all of a sudden it it has

to happen overnight almost then this is a big challenge yeah yeah yes and that is that business process that becomes the blocker more than the technology. So the technology is accelerating faster and joining the digital world faster than the business processes. And that's where we found a few pain points recently, if that makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. Mark, taking a step back in history, because you have not always been in that role, but you kind of emerged into that role. What did you do before and how did you end up

in where you are right now? So if I go way back, I used to chuck bags of sand on a trolley for customers in a DIY store when I first started out in the world of work. But that's not where people are here to hear. So I've come from that. I've worked my way through that DIY company managed to get into their IT department which then became part of a bit wider

group and then basically I joined Mitchells and Butlers a long time ago now probably about 10-15 years ago as a infrastructure analyst so I just looked after your standard infrastructure more aligned to the web but back then we weren't as digital centric it was just is a website you know for our brands um change from that to application support so i did then look after the pos and the digital platform we then separated that out and the pos went and i looked after the digital platform so i've always been close to the digital platform and it's grown. And then obviously we did the big relaunch

where we're going to drive digital, we're going to get centric. And we did have a different monitoring tool. And then it was coming up to the end of the contract and I just said, you know what? Why is it that marketing or somebody will come to us and go, you know, your websites are offline? And we're like, are they?

You know, it's not a good sign. You know, and we basically, we had this tool and then every time we had a failure, we really couldn't extract any information out of it. It was very hard. And, you know, I had a team of five looking after all these brand websites. You know, like you say, we outsourced the, you know,

the biggest scale of it all. So, and that's when we chose Dynatrace. Yeah, we looked at the Gardner Quadrant. Dynatrace was number one then. And we were like, okay, let's have a look at the website. Oh, that looks quite flashy. Apparently it does all of this wonderful stuff and tells you when they've got a follow-up.

We're all like, yeah, whatever. We've seen this before. We put it into our azure test platform that we were playing with and and it did what it said on the tin so and from that point we've never looked back and it's changed it changed our monitoring it changed our obviously it's changed our the way we see issues changed the team because we changed we went from this team that basically we were ducking every time we went our desk because if somebody wanted us, something was broke. And now this team is central to it all.

We can see where outlets aren't configured properly. So we use data trace to alert us for that. And we're proactive. We're saying to the people that are setting up the brand website, so this outlet isn't configured right, so our digital services won't work. And basically, we've now become that completely the opposite, that everybody wants a piece of our time, and we can't facilitate all the requests. So it's the team.

The team would love it more in that world now because it's broke what haven't we done. It's more about how can we help you. So it's completely changed the whole ethos of the business as well in that kind of sphere of we've got more insight than we've ever had davis ai always joked in the past that davis air is like having another team on itself because it just you know you've got this problem the root cause is this we can then target the supplier and the suppliers know we've got Dynatrace now and they just, they can't fight it. Because even in the past they've gone, oh, it's not us, prove it's us.

Well, I don't need to prove it, it's telling me and, you know, and that's the beauty of Dynatrace. So it's unlocked a lot of things other than just the monitoring in Mitchells and others. What is next for you? I know you said there's a couple, there's always, you know, digitalization doesn't stop now because COVID is over. It doesn't mean we don't have to innovate.

Any other exciting things that are coming up for you? So, I mean, we continue to grow and continue to drive. We want to implement a concept of tabs. So if you went to one of our restaurants you could technically set up a digital tab and sit and drink all day with your friends and they can go to the bar and order drinks if they scan your qr code it go in on your tab and it's just one bill at the end it's those everyday journeys that you can do if you walk in and hand your card over and they keep your card while you're not there for obviously for you know for payment reasons and everything else so it's about analyzing

every one of our journey and understanding can we digitize that can that help improve the customer experience will that help drive growth will that help drive you know with the you know redeployment of people in the you know so you can if people are serving themselves then the waiters and waitress can spend more time with you and enhance your experience so you feel like you were more you know they were more attentive to you rather than running around so there's lots and lots of things that we're working on from that perspective um but yeah at the moment should we say short term it's about let's say the word again, biz events and everything, because we see the power of biz events. It's so much for us to give us that visibility

on everything that we do. Yeah, this is a great thing that you just said. I think you said with all the friction that you take out, the customer in the end feels more taken care of because there's less time for waiting on something that they feel shouldn't take that long and therefore it feels it it gives you a better feeling right i mean that's it feels all of them i guess more connected to that brand in your case michelin paddlers you have so many different brands of restaurants and bars uh but that's

that's really that's really great and i think this is a message that I would like to give everybody that is listening, because what you are really doing, you are really making sure that, A, you understand the business processes that you have. You make them observable. So you talk with individual suppliers with different teams to make it observable end-to-end. And then you give the data and you use the data to optimize it by reducing friction, by making it easier to troubleshoot, but in the end, improve that process.

So in the end, the beneficiary of all this is the customer. It feels more taken care of. Yeah, and that's the ultimate goal. You know, we look at the delivery. We know that if we can fix the out-of-stock issue on delivery we'll move from you know what is a six percent which doesn't have a lot of six percent failure injection to pause that will be down at 0.1 0.2 failures that's how big the prize is that's why we've gone after it but you know without that insight without data trace service and that you know it's biz events that surface that data in the first place so you know, without that insight, without data trace service and that, you know, it's biz events that surface that data in the first place.

So, you know, biz events has led to biz events, you know, and it's a natural trail to go digging deeper. So what we, from our perspective, what we're always focusing on is how do we make that so frictionless that it's so slick that, A, the customers use it. The customers that aren't using it you know what they'll buy into it because they see other people having success with it you know because ultimately like i say that frees up the you know the the waiter or waitress to give that more personal experience but ultimately it's all drives to the guest experience we are in a cutthroat market as most of the people are in their industries that you know what if we can't serve you there's a pub within a few hundred yards or a restaurant a few miles away that is a competitor and they will

happily take you know our customer away so therein lies the challenge you know with a booking engine that we have you know if it's not available they'll just book somewhere else it's so cutthroat so it's very you know i the booking engine we use is, again, that's a SaaS supplier, and they do also deal with our competitors. We had a small debate, funny debate, about we use Dynatrace data and we share that with that vendor to show when we're having an issue, they expect to get a P1 because it's gone red outside. They're seeing what we're seeing before we've even logged a ticket someone said why would you do that why would you do that because

they also serve your competitors and i was like if a guest chooses to come to my website if i'm not there we've lost them potentially we've done some work on how often people book in advance but for all intents and purposes you get one shot most of the time okay in that booking so if i'm providing that information with the supplier and their service is up and running then when they come to us i'm there i'm available and they can book if i'm not they know in the faster they fix it yes they fix it for everybody else but at the same time i'm back up and running so ultimately we win because they visited us and it's not about yes somebody else might get benefit but ultimately it's about that return you know that mttr that you know that time to you know restoring the service

and if sharing my data with a third party means that that's what happens then so be it yeah somebody else might win ultimately but you know over the grand scale looking at it you know hypothetically looking at it you know from a different perspective if we're there we can take the booking we've snapped the booking we've got the customer and that's the objective to always be there be ready and have the service available so that we can execute it every time every time the best we can and when we can't get down and try to tell us why let's go digging let's find the. Let's find the friction. Let's remove the friction. Let's move forward. And I think that's a great testament to how far observability has become, right?

I mean, what came out of observability? If you think back, we started with, I guess in your world, right? When you started years ago in IT, you were probably looking at CPU metrics and network metrics and things like this. I remember writing a.NET application that would contact all of the servers and all of the DIY outlets to run the ILO metrics

to then use PowerShell scripts to consume the health status of the server. You know, because, you know, we didn't even have a monitoring tool. We were using ILO to pull in the metrics and say, you know, what is the temperature, what's the... And we were then obviously using code to do it. And then you think today, you know, Dynatrace gives you that. And in a way, it's funny you don't mention CPU because in Dynatrace and with Davis, you just take it for granted

because it does, brutally honest, it does such a good job. It almost becomes secondary because we move on, you know, in 10 years, will we talk about, you know, what we're talking about now because the product will be that powerful that there'll be new initiatives and, you know, it'll be automatically linking biz events and understanding, you know, if it's got smartscape and understand how things talk,

then it'll understand where the biz events are coming from and tie all of those together and the world is your oyster. It's exciting. I do love it because I do love the products, as anybody that knows me will know. Inside Rizzles and Butlers, they call me Mr. Dino Trace. So there you go. I've even got the label inside the business because I see the power. i see its potential and we've just got to harness it in the right way to you know to get that data and and ultimately to serve the customers i've always had a you know i

started out in that world putting bags of sand on the customer trolley helped them put it in a car and you know ultimately what makes the business move it's customers. Without the customers, without the revenue, it doesn't matter where you are in the business, at the outlet, at the head office, or anywhere else in the distribution center, unless people are coming and you're driving that revenue and you're getting that revenue, then the business has no legs and has no cash flow. And without cash flow, you're pretty much in trouble.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's also nice i mean maybe maybe maybe closing of this um i think this should be an inspiration for many that you know that feel like what's next for me also in a career because you made a big step in your career or you you progressed and now you are really helping your business to look at business relevant data and then give this data to the right people at the right time to make the right next business decision to improve the business in the end to uh to to help the customer have a better experience i think that's the great thing and um so folks if you're listening to this right we always talk about how do we get end-to-end

traceability of transactions using open telemetry or other ways what we are what we are doing now is we're elevating this and we need to figure out how do we get end-to-end business visibility into end-to-end business processes that are not just spawning one two or five microservices but actually multiple systems multiple steps you know processes that can take a minute, an hour, a day or even longer. And we need to figure out how we get all this data, how we connect it and then drive the right decisions.

And I think that's an exciting world we live in. And the digitalization and the APIs that allow us to connect to other systems make all of this possible. But we also need to think about what type of data do we need to connect to other systems, make all of this possible, but we also need to think about what type of data do we need to have to then make the right decisions. Mark, any final words from your side before we close it?

Oh, that's a good question. No, just open your mind. Anything is possible. You've just got to take a step back. Maybe, you know, you may have a few humps in the road and some tough journeys and some tough conversations but ultimately when you start unlocking the data that's when you you know i i enjoy nothing more than going to someone in the business and watching the penny drop and you see the eyes light up and you've just

gone you know they get it and all of a sudden you know that's that's a really good up and you've just gone, you know, they get it. And all of a sudden, you know, that's a really good moment and, you know, the satisfying that all of that effort culminates. And, you know, it's not necessarily somebody high up. It's, you know, you've just, you know, somebody in finance, you've just given them the piece of information that they spend hours trawling through spreadsheets for. And, you know, you go, oh, actually, if we do this, this and this, I can help you and we can capture it here and feed you that data and and that's the thing it's it's not

just an it system anymore it's it's a business system and when i say that i mean literally you know marketing finance you name it it expands it all you know all the way through to our customer services we dynatrace will will watch their applications for them internal and external. So yeah, it's a great journey. Be prepared for some bumps. But, you know, courage and conviction. Stick true to your word and you'll come out the other side and it'll be a great

journey. You'll look back and, you know, it'll be, when you reflect back, it'll be a good journey. Thanks, Mark, for these inspiring words. Hopefully, we will see many more digital readiness managers on LinkedIn after this podcast airs. Also, you mentioned that you obviously did some presentations already at Perform and other Dynatrace-related events. We will link to those in the description of the podcast. So in case you want to see him, see Mark in action,

then we'll give it a chance. And I'm pretty sure you will be back at events talking about your journey with Dynatrace, in this case, with business events and wherever the journey takes you in the future. Cool. And I want to say, Brian, sorry for you not being here, but I enjoyed the conversation. But I'm looking forward to having you back as a co-host in the next session. Thank you, though, for taking the raw recording that I produce here with Mark and then converting it into a podcast that the world, that our listeners throughout the world can listen to. Thank you so much. And with this, goodbye. See you next time. See you next time.

See you next time.