Better application performance can improve business performance, employee productivity and customer satisfaction, finds Aberdeen Group
There can be big payoffs for companies that keep close tabs on how applications are performing for end users, says Aberdeen Group in a new research report.
There can be big payoffs for companies that keep close tabs on how applications are performing for end users. Being able to monitor the end-user experience can lead to better application performance, which in turn can improve business performance, employee productivity and customer satisfaction, asserts Aberdeen Group in a new research report (available here).
Written by analyst Hyoun Park, the report identifies the steps taken by best-in-class enterprise IT groups to create a converged technology and business perspective.
The highest scorers in the study reported big gains, including the ability to proactively identify application failures 82% of the time; 99.4% average application availability; and a 30% decrease in end-user complaints due to application performance issues. On the business side, these best-in-class companies were twice as likely as other companies to improve their brand reputation over the last 12 months, and 75% more likely to improve employee productivity.
So how did they do it?
The best-in-class companies adopted an array of tactics, technologies and procedures to achieve these business and technology gains. For example, the top performers are able to prioritize business applications for monitoring; measure the number of users impacted by performance issues; measure application performance for each transaction; and associate user transactions with business processes, Aberdeen reports.
More than half of the companies deemed best-in-class were able to measure application performance for each transaction, “which provided the raw data necessary to compute performance metrics,” the report reads. “Although it is important not to make the mistake of assuming that having more data automatically results in having better data, specific transactional data allows organizations to better align technical issues with business events and processes.”
Some of the technologies that enable these capabilities are: real-time performance alerts; tools for application load testing; page-load monitoring tools; application performance monitoring tools that work across different operating systems; and tools that track performance thresholds through ongoing learning.
“The insight into actual end-user experience gives us benefits across the board, helping target response time issues, solve end-user problems faster, indentify usage and adoption issues, and even make priority decisions on ongoing application investments,” said Stuart Smith, director of CRM performance at British Telecom. (BT is profiled as a case study in the report.)
For companies that want to step up their application management game, Aberdeen Group suggests a few actions:
• Gain internal monitoring capabilities for enterprise applications and systems infrastructure used for application delivery;
• Align application sessions and transactions with business processes in a way where business value can be equated with technical uptime; and
• Monitor the end-user experience on a real-time basis and install tools that can proactively identify application problems before end-users are affected.
The report, titled “Monitoring the End-User Experience: Improving Business Performance through Application Management,” is available online (registration required). The research is sponsored by ManageEngine, Knoa, Quest Software and Gomez.
