* The idiosyncracies of QoE
Those who read this column frequently are aware of EMA’s staunch advocacy of QoE or quality of experience, as a way of bootstrapping IT management towards a more business-aligned, customer centric view. But QoE presents some unusual challenges, and is still poorly understood since it demands a fundamental mind shift away from the “conveniently technical” towards the “humanly relevant.”
Contrast this with ROI as a driver for benchmarking IT management success, and you are contrasting a relatively linear, quantitative, and inherently calculable result with an inherently non-linear, qualitative, and infinitely more complex system. In other words, you are contrasting cost metrics with a human being whose QoE for even an IT service may have more to do with dream life than CPU utilization.
Now we’re not suggesting that IT begins to dispense mood-related medication with every software upgrade, although I wouldn’t be surprised if someone, somewhere, has already tried this. But we are suggesting that IT does need to recognize that technology-related quantitative metrics, from response time to levels of security, need to be placed in context. They are simulated approximations (even in the case of observed end-user response) to enable IT to move towards a more complete and satisfying set of parameters to support the human (work, education, entertainment) experience of its customers. Even the best QoE metrics are gross-oversimplifications and guesswork. But just being aware of this fact promotes more honest customer dialog, open-mindedness and flexibility on both the provider and consumer side.
For instance Mean Opinion Scores (MOS), including such clearly technical metrics as jitter, latency and packet loss, do an adequate job in helping IT to better align infrastructure with VoIP telephony services. But customer perceptions of telephony services of any kind involve appropriateness, flexibility, cost, mobility, security (increasingly), personalization and choice. What IT continues to miss in its technology abyss with VoIP is that the real value as an integrated service portfolio won’t emerge until IT itself realigns to support it.
In other words – VoIP benefits won’t be seen until the help desk and call center are integrated, service catalogs become available to span both types of services, and ease of navigation, service selection, customization and support for consumers are matched by IT organizational resilience. (Just imagine call center best practices and ITIL becoming combined.) Only this type of integration can begin to support the full dynamic of QoE requirements that real consumers care about. Without it, VoIP will remain in the minds of many consumers as nothing more than an over-laden gimmick. Human behavior vs. technology metrics would have sent up a flare around this otherwise rather obscured point years ago.
Still, it’s good to see industry initiatives moving towards QoE – often in other guises, such as business service management (BSM) so that business transaction performance becomes a central focal points for IT service assurance. While business transaction response is only one of many components for QoE, it is probably the single most helpful place to start. BMC, Compuware with its acquisition of Adlex, CA with its recent acquisitions of Wily Technologies and Concord, and HP with its Transaction Analyzer have all made advances towards a more transaction-driven service management paradigm.
This is a good first step – with probably about 30 more to follow – as the industry moves towards QoE. Some other vendors, such as Coradiant, eG Innovations, Optier, Empirix, and Proactivenet, and in pre-and post-deployment, Opnet and Shunra – have made put a clear emphasis on QoE. And these are just a handful of vendors – there are probably in excess of 50 – that have made dramatic improvements in monitoring service response via business transactions.
Clearly, QoE will be fun to watch as a bellwether, just as the Configuration Management Database is a bellwether of a different kind. QoE will drive huge analytic investments towards aligning IT with human consumption preferences, human tastes, human behaviors and human needs. The CMDB will drive huge data integration and analytic investments to enable QoE across diverse infrastructure components in support of all IT disciplines. In this single dynamic, perhaps, you can begin to chart the course of IT management technology over the next 20 years.
