Enterprise IT Performance

Stephen Arthur

Background and Definitions What is IT?

What is performance?

What about Enterprise IT Performance?

Enterprise IT Performance Challenges Example

Have you called a help desk before?

Provided an account or order number to ask a question?

Been asked to wait while the system loads?

Experienced an extended wait for the information to load?

Enterprise IT Performance Challenges The problem in the example has multiple

levels.

1) You are receiving sub-standard customer service

2) The business is losing productivity at the helpdesk

Enterprise IT Performance Challenges Other possible manifestations:

Actual IT system downtime / outage will lead to business loss... sometimes substantial depending on the system and its role

Poor end-user (customer) experiences initially will reduce the number of click-through, conversions, checkouts... your business goals will be undermined

Slow system performance will detract from your brand value with the established user base and/or new potential users

Poor internal (employee) experiences will lead to loss of productivity/morale

How do I address these challenges? First step: Monitoring

You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

So let’s implement or enhance monitoring solutions used by your organization.

This doesn’t need to be expensive, and in some cases you may have tools in place that come with your platform.

Enterprise IT Performance Challenge

Actual IT system downtime / outage will lead to business loss... sometimes substantial depending on the system and its role

Enterprise IT Performance Solution Implement a rudimentary level of monitoring

on your website and applications to ensure the down/up status of your systems.

Send alerts / notifications when something is wrong!

Enterprise IT Performance Challenge

Poor end-user (customer) experiences initially will reduce the number of click-through, conversions, checkouts... your business goals will be undermined

Enterprise IT Performance Solution Enhance the basic level of monitoring to

watch your critical business transactions

This enables smart business decision making and can help spot performance problems while they occur

Enterprise IT Performance Challenge

Slow system performance will detract from your brand value with the established user base and/or new potential users

Enterprise IT Performance Solution Understand how new users come across your

service and take steps to ensure their first experience is positive

Standard checklists and tools for fine-tuning HTML performance will keep your website running great

Enterprise IT Performance Challenge

Poor internal (employee) experiences will lead to loss of productivity/morale

Enterprise IT Performance Solution Make sure that your internal users are cared

for as well. Follow the same processes on internal-facing systems!

Using a slow application for hours each day creates grumpy employees… and speed-ups will result in improved productivity as well.

Monitoring – Demo of up/down monitor

Monitoring – Demo of Common Solutions

Improving your enterprise’s IT performance Work with vendors where possible to make

sure all contractual service levels for performance are being met. Ask for suggestions, especially if you have problem areas or a support contract.

More detailed monitoring can help you understand how users actually use the system. This can enable smart design decisions.

Adopt a performance mentality across your organization. Act on your monitoring information.

Next Steps Performance can make an appearance in

many phases of your enterprise IT management lifecycle: Requirements – Understand “how” and “how

much” users will utilize your application with a workload analysis

Simulation – Modeling can predict how a fairly standard application will behave in order to estimate infrastructure costs accurately and source the right hardware

Testing – Benchmark an application specifically for performance before production deployment

Instrumentation – If you have monitored your application and realize there is a problem, there are tools which help you uncover the root cause

Questions?