April 28, 2010

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.

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.