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?