While many companies talk about measuring the end user experience, few actually do it. For many companies, capturing the user experience requires a significant paradigm shift from the way they operate today. For example, most Production Support organizations measure success by tracking the health of the I.T. infrastructure. Consequently, metrics like server uptime and network availability dominate their scorecard to Senior Management. That’s all well and good but how are these metrics tied back to the success of the business? In most cases, they’re not.

Of course these issues have an impact as to how the end user interacts with your online systems, but are you really measuring the right things? Is the business asking you about the state of the network, or is it asking you why online orders have dropped off for the last several hours? The reality is that while these infrastructure metrics are important, they are only part of the picture, and the revised I.T. scorecard should focus on what’s important: “The End User Experience.” This means gathering metrics on the critical business processes that drive revenue for the business.

If the success criteria are focused on measuring your customers’ online interaction with your business, does this responsibility belong to the Production Support team? We’d say, “yes” and “no.” Since the charter of most Production Support teams is to keep the I.T. infrastructure up and running, Production Support teams historically do not understand the business aspects of what they are supporting. Their focus is on the server hardware and network routers that make up the computing infrastructure. In fact, for most Production Support teams, these business metrics have little or no meaning.

So how do we overcome these historical norms and move to a more viable way of supporting the overall business objectives? Given we understand the organizational issues, we have to step back and evaluate who needs to be a part of the solution. What expertise is needed to support the overall health of the business? We’d say you have to implement a solution that spans all the stakeholders within the organization as illustrated below.

Doing so brings in all the necessary skill sets to understand the complexity of the related problems and how best to capture and understand the implications. So when does this process start? It starts at the beginning. It is an application lifecycle approach “inception to retirement.” Of course the workload for each team varies through the application lifecycle, but it’s important to bring the related teams together to bridge the gaps in responsibilities and expertise.

This section has covered some of the business aspects of how to organize for success. Please see the “Services” section for the technical aspects as to how these goals are accomplished.