Stem the tide of user dissatisfaction with IT via application monitoring

You may not have noticed any changes in your organization yet, but it seems that dissatisfaction with IT is on the rise.  To give you some quick data points, 94% of IT projects are unsuccessful , a mere 15% of employees say that they are completely satisfied with their technology management department’s understanding of what they need to be successful, and only 13% of executives are satisfied that their IT organizations are very effective at introducing new technologies faster than competitors.

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As your role changes from tech gatekeeper to tech enabler, it is time to address the #1 customer complaint have about IT: “The application is not fast enough!”. Here are some quick tips to help you get the work done.

Tip #1: Monitor your applications from your end-user perspective.
Your applications are the lifeblood of your business, so they must consistency perform well, and perform fast. Otherwise, revenue and productivity will be lost, business operations will be disrupted, and user complains and escalations will go through the roof. An infrastructure-centric monitoring approach is not enough. Instead, you need to simulate and measure availability and response time of critical transactions on a 24x7x365 basis, from your user perspective, as shown below:

• User 1- CRM logging –> Open a customer record –>Add a sales log –>Log-out
• User 2- CRM logging –>Access sales pipeline –>Generate a report –> Log-out
• And so on

With proactive user-centric monitoring you can isolate problematic trends much earlier, and find and resolve issues before your users are impacted.

Tip #2: Proactively monitor all common workflows .
Take the time to map-out who your users are, and how they interact with your applications so you can monitor key user interactions. For example, with Epic EMR, both patients & doctors access MyChart records, so you should monitor Epic EMR response time from both patient and doctor perspectives, as shown below.

Doctor– MyChart log-in –> Access a patient record–> Add visit log–> Save–> Logout
Patient– MyChart log-in –> Access my record–> Search doctor phone information–> Logout

Also, if you are implementing or maintaining SAP, check out some additional SAP monitoring tips.

Tip #3: Find geographical response time discrepancies early on.
In some cases, employees in remote offices could experience slower response times than employees accessing your applications from headquarters. The faster way to find and troubleshoot problems like this is to monitor and compare availability and response time of your applications across multiple locations (Headquarters, Boston, NYC, remote office locations, etc.).

Tip #4: Validate and share SLAs reports with users and stakeholders.
In a new era where customer satisfaction rules, you need to continuously validate and demonstrate your SLAs. Therefore, you should track, report and periodically share your SLAs with management and stakeholders. With a metric-driven strategy in place you can keep stakeholders in the know, and quickly ascertain if you need to focus on app performance optimization or not.

Tip #5: Boost IT efficiency with a single solution to manage your entire application portfolio.
From legacy applications, to client server applications, to web applications, to home-grown custom applications, cloud applications or green screen apps, most large enterprises have a complex portfolio with 250-500 applications to support. The cost of purchasing, configuring and maintaining several monitoring products to support individual applications is too high. Plus lack of integration across monitoring consoles hinders troubleshooting and increases Mean-Time-To-Resolution (MTTR). Instead, look for one solution that lets you test and monitor all applications, regardless of where they are deployed.

Are you ready to boost user satisfaction with IT? Check out CitraTest APM!
CitraTest APM periodically executes synthetic transactions, taking response time measurements along the way. By automating the driving of ANY application — just like a real user would do — visually examining the desktop and responding to changes, driving the keyboard and mouse– CitraTest APM ensures that all critical aspects of an application or service are available and working effectively, alerting you in real-time at the first sign of trouble – before your users complain.

Good luck!