Why care about application performance? Because it forges a vital link between business and IT – that’s why.
Year after year, in survey after survey, linking business and IT appears on CIO “must do this year” lists. Why is it so hard to move this goal to the “done” list? There are many reasons, but a big one is that IT managers tend to look at the world from the bottom up rather than top down.
The typical network or data center team is swamped. They must learn new technology, handle endless moves-adds-changes, make necessary capacity upgrades, report on system health, attend management meetings, and pounce on the latest crisis. That leaves no time for serious planning or proactive process improvement – and it leaves pitifully little time for the fun and interesting work investigating and installing cool new technology.
We talk to many network managers who paint this picture – some even say, “People view us as the gnomes who work behind the scene to keep things running.” IT managers often find it frustrating to get management’s attention to promote a good idea because management doesn’t appreciate what they can contribute.
The management reports you generate usually reflect a good bottom-up view of what you are doing to keep things running. The reports cover topics like device availability, bandwidth utilization, number of problems resolved, time to resolve problems, schedule of upcoming changes, etc. Although these bottom up things are important, they describe “what you do” not “what you impact.” There is a big difference.
Bottom up reports cover asset management. Every company invests a lot in IT assets and wants them to operate properly. Element and enterprise management systems are designed to produce a weekly bottom up “what we did” report focusing on asset performance.
But the business runs on applications. Users only see how applications run on their screens. So a top-down view reflecting the user experience is required. Application performance reporting is much more valuable than asset performance reporting to departments outside of IT who just want to get their work done. By showing that you improved the user experience, you are delivering a “what we impacted” report, linking IT to the business.
Good application performance management requires a well thought out mélange of tools and processes. It takes work to put this in place, but fortunately you can do it in small steps – and it is well worth doing because the rewards are high.
Our studies show that enterprises that do application performance management well deliver 50% better performance to their users. That kind of successful IT/business linkage should get your team raises and promotions because it makes application users more productive and your company more profitable. Stay tuned to our blog where we will describe processes and tools that will help you look good – and give you more time to investigate and install cool new technology.
