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?