Last week, I wrote about how and why network management is "cool again" based on a panel I moderated at Interop earlier this month. This week, I'm basing my column in part on another panel, as well as some active correspondence and dialog on multiple fronts.

The Interop panel was called "Is there a Single Metric for IT Success?" and was hosted by Allistair Croll from Coradiant. The panel included Eric Siegel from the Burton Group (as did my panel), and Peter Sevcik from NetForecast. The subsequent correspondence and dialog has been with multiple clients on quality of experience (QoE). The overarching theme between the two is, of course, how IT can most effectively and meaningfully set metrics to account for success - in satisfying its customers and in aligning to the business.

I should start by saying that Sevcik has developed a fairly compelling formula - Apdex - to capture performance values for enterprise applications in a single metric. I won't try to do full justice to it here, but it acknowledges the need for pervasive and observed insights into actual application response at the desktop or end station - which is of course where the user "experiences" the application service.

However, the panel was entitled "A Single Metric for IT Success." So I suggested that just like any business, IT needs to assess itself based on three overall areas of concern: quality, cost and demand.

The first two are perhaps self evident to most in IT. The third - "demand" - may seem like a stretch. But in an era of accountability and business alignment, IT's ability to capture and anticipate demand for its service "products" not only helps account for costs but also helps to plan for more effective service offerings. It may also expose business or consumer behaviors that are unexpected or undesirable, or conversely desirable but not anticipated.

Having these insights places IT as a truly proactive partner with the customers it serves. Not having insight into demand - beyond the raw assumptions that if someone thinks they want a service they probably do - leaves the door open for unused and wasteful service offerings, while neglecting trends and requirements for new services, or extensions of existing services.

I am happy to say that the panel recognized the fact that there are other metrics for success in this way, and so we redefined the focus around the implied topic - a single metric for success in assessing application service performance. And this brings me to some subsequent dialogs on QoE. More than one vendor has advocated the term 'end-to-end QoE" and I've been inclined to challenge this.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.