Applications are the heart and soul of every business. They’re often the first level of contact your customers have with you. You could call them the front man for your business. When a user first interacts with you, in most cases, you only have a few seconds to gain their loyalty and that depends largely on the performance of your applications. It’s something we have been preaching to our clients for a while now. Application performance is essential to the digital enterprise. Why? Because better application performance leads to better user experiences which ultimately leads to a better business.
Imagine Sharon, a long-time customer of yours, visits your online store, chooses her products and proceeds to check out. BUT your payment system is down and your customer can no longer complete the transaction. She leaves your site and decides to make her purchase on your competitor’s site.
What does this mean to your business? You lost out on a sale and may have lost a loyal customer to a competitor.
What does this mean to your IT team? There was an IT or system fault.
Poor application performance is not simply an IT fault. Application issues are customer service issues. CIO’s must change their perspective on application outages and application performance issues. IT must adopt the user perspective and continuously improve application experience based on this perspective.
IT teams are now being held accountable for delivering real business value through the effective use of technology. Pretty soon your IT team’s bonuses will be based on things like user engagement, conversion rates and revenue generated. Your role as a CIO is evolving. The boundaries between departments and functional areas of the business are being blurred. Now more than ever IT must become a business enabler by turning application performance into a strategic advantage.
Do you have the tools to deliver optimal customer experiences? The kind of experiences that will improve customer satisfaction, increase sales and foster customer loyalty?
The modern day CIO is now at the front lines of customer experience. They must be able to react quickly to application issues and gain better insight into what is driving the quality of their applications. They must be able to proactively manage their applications and react more swiftly to issues to drive high customer satisfaction.
Few need convincing that the rate of change in business operations and the complexity of applications have skyrocketed. Our dependence on business applications, growing security threats, new technology layers, and the adoption of cloud services have all contributed to this. Conquering that growing complexity and deriving insight into a technology landscape that is increasingly hybrid is something very few businesses have mastered.
Businesses have begun investing big bucks to better manage their applications and supporting IT infrastructure. But, are we spending our precious (and for some dwindling) IT budget on the wrong things?
Many have invested in a mix of reporting and analysis tools to manage different types of data and functions; one solution to monitor customer behavior across channels, another to manage application health, an entirely separate system to monitor server performance etc. A recent survey conducted by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) shows that more than 66% of businesses are managing their infrastructure and applications with 10+ enterprise monitoring/management tools. These businesses are now finding themselves with multiple disparate solutions that don’t talk to each other and are not providing the answers they need. With little integration between these systems, it’s no wonder businesses are struggling to identify and mend issues when they arise. EMA found that it takes, on average, more than 10 people hours to evaluate, diagnose and fix a problem.
The tools being used to manage IT infrastructure have not kept up with the rapid pace of technology. The speed of business has changed, beyond the capacity of these legacy systems. This method leads to re-active performance management and poor user experience. Today’s markets demand speed. If you want to remain competitive your operations, sales, customer service and support teams need real-time data that will enable them to make course corrections and react to events as soon as they happen, not months down the road when historical datasets are analyzed like with traditional BI processes. You can’t drive your business forward with backward looking data.
It’s your job as the CIO to provide that information to the business. Your servers, devices, on-premises applications, SaaS systems and machines generate terabytes of data. Valuable data. Data that very few businesses are using. Browser and mobile performance data, clickstreams, social media posts, application logs, server health to name a few.
By collecting all business transactions and events you can dive deeper into the performance of your applications by correlating the business and application performance in real-time. Imagine being able to closely monitor business events in real-time from a single dashboard, analyze those events and take action immediately. Going back to our example with Sharon’s online purchase. Imagine if, moments after her transaction failed, your system initiated a new step in the business process which sends her an email coupon for 10% off her next purchase. Or maybe the event is automatically highlighted and sent to a human operator to follow up with Sharon and process the order manually. How would that impact your relationship with her? This is where the world is going. These are the tools you need to remain competitive.
So, how do you get other folks in your organization educated and build their curiosity so it’s not just IT driving this initiative? That’s where we come in. Our new event, Insights 365, will help you lead a digital transformation initiative that drives real results.
We’ll provide you with the tools to manage the performance of applications across your entire landscape, no matter where the application is sitting. We’ll help you build a series of dashboards that will turn your machine and application data into usable, actionable insights.
You’ll learn:
- How to take control of your application environments with end-to-end, insight-driven management.
- The top 10 ways to fine-tune and optimize your application environment for the ultimate user experience.
- How to gather data from multiple systems (on premise, cloud, Office 365, CRM Online, Azure, and more).
- How to analyze data by focusing on user interactions.
- How to securely share data in real-time and make faster business decisions from any device, at any location at any time.
If Insights 365 is anything like our last event, Loadfest 365, spots will fill up quickly. Email sales@navantis.com for more information or sign up today www.insight365.ca!
The post Better Application Performance Leads to Better Business, It’s That Simple. appeared first on Navantis Blog.
