I saw a great slide the other day that drove home to me the difference between traditional IT SLA’s and how they don’t translate into a customer experience measurement.
99% availability across six different measures might sound pretty good unless of course those 1% service interruptions all happened at different times of the month. And if one of those times was in the middle of a peak trading period for your online services, and thousands of customers were impacted, that traditional IT availability metric really isn’t giving you the full picture around customer experience impact is it now.
So how should companies respond to this? When looking to build platforms that monitor and manage performance and availability across your IT business systems, focus on addressing the following three key dimensions;
- End-to-end customer visibility– you need insight into your user’s behaviour, end-to-end, to allow you to react more quickly to customer issues. Whilst standalone vendor tools will give you a view of what is happening in their product realm, unless you want to manually stitch logs from multiple systems together you won’t be able to get an end-to-end view.
- Performance management– you need the ability to be able to pinpoint root cause immediately and improve mean time to resolution. Without an end-to-end view and the ability to dive into an issue at a code level in real-time; you’re going to struggle to find that needle in a haystack when you are faced with those tricky “the system is running slow” scenarios.
- Shared data for business and IT– the key here is to align different teams around a common set of metrics. Those metrics need to provide real-time insight into your customer’s user experience, so that business & IT teams can work together to resolve issues.
