The Main Performance Problem

Dennis Drogseth’s post The Many Dimensions of User Experience Management (UEM) is very indicative of the main problem we have in performance: people thinking about many small specific performances, but we have just one PERFORMANCE. It depends on many different components and manifests itself in many different ways, but any attempt to decompose it results in silos and losing some important parts of the whole.

From the post: When we asked “What is your primary driver?” Better application performance and triage came in fifth, with only 13% of the votes. Employee productivity topped the list at 23%, followed by business competitiveness and/or revenue at 20%. Better support for services delivered over the network came in third, and brand protection and customer satisfaction came in fourth.

Well. Ask , for example, business users about JVM performance and it probably won’t get into the first hundred of issues they care about. Does it prove anything? No. They care a lot about it if they use J2EE systems, but just don’t know about it (except maybe a few most curious).

“Employee productivity” heavily depends on application performance. ” Business competitiveness and/or revenue” is related to application performance. “Better support for services delivered over the network” – not sure what it means, but performance also comes to mind. “Customer satisfaction” – performance is a pretty major component. And even with “brand” quite may be impacted by bad performance. Probably business users (and not only business) don’t care much about performance when it is good, but as soon as performance degrades, it immediately jumps on the top of everybody’s priority list.

I, of course, don’t want to say that performance is the main thing in business – if you don’t have any business, you may not be concerned with performance. But as soon as you do, application performance would impact all parts of your business. But you notice it only when it is bad (and usually it will happen soon if you don’t take care).

Then the post says: Similarly, when we wanted to understand which organizations or groups within IT and the business were behind UEM or QoE, the Help Desk/End User Support came in first, Customer Experience Management came in second, and Applications Management and Network Operations were tied at third and fourth place.

And when asked which organization is likely to DRIVE the overall QOE/UEM initiative, the first five groups were: Line of Business, Customer Experience Management, Process Management and Compliance Professional, Help Desk, and Service Management.
Applications Management came in seventh, one percentage point after Infrastructure Management!

Yeah, exactly proves the point: there is no organization/group responsible for performance today. Not sure what “Application Management” is (I don’t recall seeing such group – app admins?). And it is not surprising that people don’t put such group to drive such initiative – I guess perception is that such groups are groups of IT geeks doing something with computers, not caring about business, and starting to do something only when would be told by CIO to fix it (that, unfortunately, often is close to the truth).

How it relates to concept of Application Performance Management (which is rather concept for the moment)? It just proves that it doesn’t exist in practice (at least in its ideal form). Usually there is no organization responsible for it (as holistic concept, in conjunction with business).

What are end-user response times (what EUM monitors)? They are external symptoms of application performance. The only part of application performance end users care about. The tip of the iceberg. If we are saying that we want to manage application performance, would end-user response times part of it? I have no doubt it would. Otherwise the whole concept doesn’t make sense.

The post states: User Experience Management also has strong business impact, governance, service level and user productivity implications that transcend performance management. Yes, performance has “business impact, governance, service level and user productivity implications”.

So the data provided in the post, by my opinion, proves two things: business cares about performance a lot, but there is no any reliable structure in place to care about end-to-end performance.

Actually I am rather confused by the term User Experience Management. I understand what it is User Experience Monitoring or End User Experience (which usually used in the context of measuring response times). But how would you manage it? You may manage your application/systems which would improve response times. Unless you just saying that you want to use the name User Experience Management as an umbrella name covering all related to performance (including APM, Capacity Planning, etc., etc.) – which maybe an option, but it doesn’t look like it is used this way. Or maybe User Experience Management is used as a wider term including usability, UX (User eXperience), etc., which usually relate to UI design? If yes, then it indeed includes important factors not related to performance and only partially overlaps with APM – but then I am not sure why we compare EUM with APM.

Ian Molyneaux’s post The Case for the CPO brought the topic of a person responsible for performance to its extreme. Great idea, but… How far are we from there? Forget CPO, but just having a person (or persons) responsible for end-to-end performance and building up the process assuring such performance? See job posting – have somebody seen any position saying that we need a person to drive performance in our organization (and meant it)? I haven’t. All positions are for a specific silo team or for consulting. So it looks like it would be awhile until we see a more holistic approach to performance (whatever name would be used for it).

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