Last time, we discussed that fact that roughly two-thirds of IT organizations either already have formalized processes in place to manage applications performance or are currently working to create them. Today, we’ll look at how effective those processes are and describe other impediments to successful application delivery.

Last fall, we surveyed 215 IT professionals who were given a list of four possible impediments to effective application delivery and were asked to rate their significance. The most significant is that the processes that they have in place to manage application delivery are inadequate. The next most important is the difficulty in explaining the causes of application degradation and getting any real buy-in. A little bit less of an impediment is the fact that the tools the respondents use to manage application delivery are inadequate. Although it was the least important, almost one-quarter of the respondents indicated that there is an adversarial relationship between the application development group and the rest of IT.

One way to look at the survey feedback from is that three of the top four impediments to effective application delivery have little to do with technology. Another way to look at the feedback is in the context of what we discussed in the last newsletter – that two-thirds of IT organizations either already have formalized processes in place to manage applications performance or are currently working to create these processes. The good news is that most IT organizations have these processes; the bad news is that in many cases these processes are inadequate.

While we are not pleased that such a high percentage of the survey respondents indicated that their application delivery processes are inadequate, we were not terribly surprised. In general, IT organizations have always struggled to implement effective processes for functions such as change and configuration management. So given that it is often difficult to implement effective processes for a given technology within a single organizational unit, it should not be a surprise that it is even more difficult to implement effective processes for application delivery – a function that cuts across multiple technologies and multiple organizational units.

More information on this topic can be found in the report “The Handbook of Application Delivery,” available free of charge here.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.