Posts Tagged End User Experience
Pages or people? OpTier has redefined end-user experience monitoring.
End-User Experience Monitoring. Real User Montoring. The key words here are Experience and Real. When you are choosing a solution for monitoring the experience of your customers, partners and employees, it’s critical to keep their perspective in mind.
What’s important to your users – pages or transactions? When you are banking online, and it’s taking a long time to view that suspicious-looking check that you supposedly wrote last week, do you care about the rest of the page? The page probably includes more information about your account activity and enables you to conduct additional transactions like transferring funds and tracking automatic payments. But you may not even know what page you are on. Your only concern is the business transaction that you are currently trying to complete – viewing your cancelled check.
Yet most end-user experience monitors track pages or page objects. Pages are significant to application developers, but they are rarely meaningful to users or the business. Of course we need to track information about pages in order to isolate and resolve problems. But in order to understand the user experience, and to triangulate that with SLAs and business priorities, you need to monitor and measure the performance of business transactions.
Part of the problem with monitoring pages lies in the definition of a page. Technically speaking, a page is a URI, a Unique Resource Identifier. But what the user views as a page may actually be a container displaying a number of URIs. When we are monitoring pages, it’s important to be able to track and analyze the page as a transaction – the way the user experiences it – as well as in its component parts. Given all of this complexity, it’s also important to be able to identify, classify and group the page components automatically, while leveraging as much meaningful information as possible. Otherwise, you are going to spend a lot of time manually “recreating” the application your users experience from an assortment of objects and content items with unrecognizable names.
According to one industry analyst, “One of the key goals in deploying end-user monitoring solutions is to move from an IT-centric view to actually realizing how IT is contributing to business goals. The value of end-user experience information significantly increases if organizations have capabilities for translating application performance metrics into business metrics such as lost revenue opportunities, conversions, the value of transactions failed, application utilization, disruptions of business processes, etc.” By using a Business Transaction Management (BTM) approach to End-User Experience Monitoring, you can evaluate your users “real experience” and measure its impact on your business.
Add comment April 28, 2010
Experiencing IT
I’ve been in IT for longer than I care to admit.
This week, as we were putting the final touches on the exciting launch of our new Experience Manger product I had a recollection from the “beginning of time”. It was more than 20 odd years ago, and I was given ownership of the main logistics and maintenance operations management application for the Navy shipyards. No, not an SAP module – this is pre SAP times, and not a interactive application even. It was a batch application and users in the shipyards would feed it with information about planned and on-going production, maintenance and repair work on a daily basis by filling in data cards, to be punched in by “data processing clerks”. Our Main Frame COBOL programs would do their magic overnight and issue a set of reports that would be FACed to the yards (No, not FAXed – FACed as in “get them out with the First Available Courier). Nifty things could be done with these reports like identifying critical project paths, forecasted delays and applying workforce optimization. We were very proud of the smart code that produced them.
On my first day in my new role as the application owner I get a call from my chief customer, the guy who runs ops in shipyards. He cordially invites me over to visit, “I want you to come see how your stuff is used in the field”. Next thing I knew, I had a protective helmet and gloves on and was spending a day with the hardened men of the shipyard in the belly of submarines, metal workshops, and on the deck of the patrol ships being quality inspected for battle readiness. Everywhere I looked the input forms for our application and the output report cutouts were hung, and in the ops office planning officers were huddled around the planning charts produced the night before. They talked to me about application changes they need and about being able to update during the work day and to get reports on demand, and they repeatedly reminded me of the time when the reports did not arrive in the morning and work was halted, and when data was missing from the reports because it had not made it into the night run. They gave me a taste for what it feels like to be a customer of our applications and felt it was the very first thing they needed to do to make me a better partner.
Fast forward to today’s reality: the essentials have not changed – the most important thing IT professionals do is still putting business enabling products in the hands of our customers – the business users. And these products still have to work again and again and again for each and every user and continuously improve. A primary concern of IT professionals will always be a true and deep understanding of those users and the ways in which they use business enabling IT services.
20 years after MF batch heydays, we are fortunate to live in an era when understanding how users experience IT services does not require taking a ride to the shipyards or visiting the online consumer’s home. And as the underlying technology has evolved to be far more complex than those early COBOL days so has the focus on the quality of experience.
On this day of the launch of our Experience Manager product it feels great to take a part in making the IT experience a better one for all involved – the users consuming the services and the IT professionals providing them.
Add comment October 1, 2009
Why Every Business Transaction Counts
It’s ironic how I’m writing this week’s blog in the comfort of EL AL’s business lounge whilst my plane destined for Tel Aviv is being fixed (or so I was told 15 minutes ago). Travelling to Israel has been a part and parcel of my job for the past four years and even today I still run into issues (admittedly most of them caused by laziness at the airport). A classic example is getting a hold of Israeli Shekels to pay the taxi driver at the other end. It would be too easy to get these at the AMEX counter at London Heathrow, so instead I wait until I land and use the cash machines at the baggage claim at Ben Gurion Airport, Israel. I mean, how hard can it be to use a cash machine in another country? Answer: impossible.
No cash means no Shakshouka breakfast in Tel Aviv!
I like most people in the world have a cash card. This plastic thing can be inserted into an ATM machine and with a correct PIN I can request money in virtually any country I’m in. Nine times out of ten the money will start flowing but in the exceptional circumstance it doesn’t I hit a major problem. No cash means no taxi and no taxi means no hotel room and no hotel room means I get to sleep at the airport; quite a problem when you’ve just landed on a red eye flight into Tel Aviv at 4am in the morning and you’re begging for that hotel bed.
Solution – give my bank a call. I’m really not joking, I call their support helpline and say “Hi, I’ve just landed in Israel and my cash card isn’t working which means I can’t get a taxi to my hotel”. The bank’s response is initially one of surprise before I get passed through to their fraud department who then pulls up my bank account details and confirms that I attempted to withdraw cash in a foreign country a few minutes ago. They have all the intelligence and data to know exactly why my ATM transaction wouldn’t give me cash. They can identify a risk, isolate it and take action in pretty much real-time to prevent someone who they think is about to commit fraudulent activity and damage their business. Unfortunately for me, my bank tends to be trigger happy when I travel to different parts of the world resulting in my cash card being stopped temporarily. I might be the one in a million customers who has this problem so its important my bank can explain themselves.
The good thing about my bank is that they have a complete history of all their customers transactions (including mine). They know who, what, where and when things were requested from my bank account so if I need help they can see things through my eyes without having to ask me ten thousand questions. They can also give me answers to my problems in seconds like “Sorry Sir, we’ve put your card on hold because it was abnormal activity in a foreign country. Give us 5 minutes and we’ll re-activate it”.
What banks do with monitoring ATM transactions is very similar to what many companies are doing with Business Transaction Management to help their IT departments provide a better level of service to users. When a user calls up the application support team or help desk complaining of issues, IT needs a complete history of that user’s activity and transactions so they know the who, what, where and when. Without this information it becomes a near impossible task to provide answers. If application support replied “sorry we have no history of your transactions”, what is the user likely to think?
23:38pm Flight update: Will have more information in 15 minutes.
Business Transaction Management gives application support and help desk complete visibility into all business transactions for all users across all IT components all of the time. This unique visibility therefore makes it very simple for IT to provide the answers it needs when problems arise and end users are affected. I mean, wouldn’t it be great to know that your website shopping basket transaction failed because some guy in marketing was running a report for the last three months on the same database that your shopping basket transaction was talking to…or that you can’t log onto your CRM system because the authentication server your transaction talks to died five minutes ago?
Managing IT from the business transaction perspective is helping many organisations today provide answers to their users, and more importantly to the business that is looking to improve service levels and end user experience.
00:03am Flight Update: Plane will fly at 10.00am tomorrow morning. Great – thanks EL AL!
Add comment June 21, 2009
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