When it Comes to Application Performance, User is Still God
In today’s IT environment, every solution provider is gaga about their application and endeavors to vindicate its pre-eminence, omitting the performance of the application and expectations of the business. However, IT solution providers should distinctly comprehend that the key to meeting the business requirements still relies on the performance of the application. High performance applications yields customer satisfaction, productive employees and enhances revenue which in turn, ultimately complements the performance of the business as a whole.
When it comes to Application Performance, User is still God
Indeed, IT solution providers continue to struggle with the best ways to enhance the performance of the system. Today an application’s performance is one of the key parameters to evaluate them. A well performing application not only aids the internal users to work efficiently and productively, but also helps a business to reduce its operational expenses and cost. Even though the solution providers predominantly utilize certain level of Application Performance Management (APM) tools, they find it challenging to sustain with the complex IT environment and to meet customer demands. Since, the solution providers prefer to work in a reactive way, the imperativeness of application performance and monitoring would become their priority only when a problem arises.
It’s a time to change and realize the transformative potential of a more strategic and proactive approach to APM. A survey conducted by research agencies on application performance issues highlights that more than 50 percent of businesses have experienced loss of staff productivity owing to application downtime and poor performance. Indeed, they have had to spend excessive time in resolving the critical issues which in turn restraints their ability to improve the service delivery quality and to meet changing business needs. Besides, the survey also states that abundance in performance realization has emerged due to the direct experience of woes confronted with critical application.
It’s high time that IT organizations recognize the strategic value of APM, be proactive and embrace the developing trends by using the APM techniques earlier in the software development life cycle.
Blog by: Ashish Gupta, Senior Business Analyst, Ramco Systems
Ashish: You have touched upon an important and one of the key success factors of an Application.
Traditionally, Performance is always given less importance and other Project considerations and priorities are given importance. Even though conventional Application development Methodologies do suggest for taking care of Non-Functional requirements along with the Functional requirements, seldom this is done.
Application performance becomes vital from the Gen-Y Users’ perspective of extremely limited patience levels and high expectations in Application performance and also the way applications are used due to huge penetration of Mobile devices.
Business Application teams have to combine the power of our MUSIC theme and shift the paradigm of designing User interfaces in a traditional manner to that which is simple, intuitive, very less data entry and extremely fast. Application performance should not be looked isolatedly from Code tuning perspective. It has to move along with the way the work processes are defined and achieved in the Business Application.
This is certainly achievable, but the traditional approach has to be dropped and relooked completely.
I would urge you to have a look at some of the New Gen-Y UIs defined by our Product teams and suggest a few UIs for our RMS Solution.
A Catchy Heading – “User is Still God”.
Now a days, some technology corporations have a dedicated employee called as the “User Experience Guide” for all their projects. The task of these empolyees is to provide a perspective of how an end user at the last level of each of the applications will feel, when they use the system – in a very critical way.
The user Experience and performance of an application, plays a very important role in terms of the longetivity of a system. For example, if the end user gets used to a working style, it is very difficult for him/ her to change it and they would require a very compelling reason to do that. In today’s environment, I feel, it is highly important for us to focus on creating such a compelling reason for our users to change into new systems, to be “ever Relavent” in this ever changing industry. Our success will lie on, providing such a compelling reason, coupled with performance and experience.
We should be able to give a measurable constant for the performance of our system, in comparison. Like, the time value that your system can provide to every user. (An idea similar to value stream mapping that is used in SCM). SImilarly, we should also be able to make the customer feel at ease while looking at our system.
These two will go a long way in our APM’s.
A Big Issue in Application Performance–” Robustness or Simplicity”.
Even if the application is robust but is complex, it will obviously hit the user Experience and his adaptibility to the Application. A user always looks forward for a Simple Application to work upon but on the other way around also expects the Software to consider all the Complex Business Scenarios.
Hence , main challenge is to look “robustness and simplicity’.
In India, a good no of users are hardly more than a Graduate and are asked to work on Online Software with complex Business Scenarios and hence fails to match the Companies requirement of Performing and adapting the Software
–Vikash