A quick summary of theAberdeen Group Benchmark report, “Getting IT on the C-Level’s Agenda,”:
It ain’t.
Well, it’s not on the agenda of most companies and Ann Bednarz at Network World explains how bad the situation is – despite years of hammering home the importance of identifying problems before users are effected, 61% of the respondants in the Aberdeen study said that they couldn’t do that. Despite the importance of measuring the business impact of application performance, 49% said they couldn’t do that. A full 46% even said that they lacked visibility into the end-user experience.
And the companies affected by these problems cited decreases in employee productivity and customer satisfaction. Conversely, those companies that took steps to address these problems reported an 83% success rate in preventing issues with application performance before users are impacted, with 113% average improvements in application response times.
That companies have problems in these areas isn’t unusual; but the percentage of companies that haven’t addressed these problems this late in the IT game astounds me. For example, take this quote from the Network World article:
“Originally we thought that we didn’t have enough bandwidth to run an ERP application and were thinking about adding an additional T-1 line. However, a technology solution that we had in place helped us realize the root-cause of the problem was on the application side — not the network,” the IT director shared with Aberdeen. “This allowed us to avoid adding more bandwidth, but it also allowed us to be able to effectively manage application performance on an ongoing basis and address potential problems before they could impact end-users.”
If there’s one thing that we’ve been trying to hammer home with this blog, (other than that D&D is awesome and that you shouldn’t knock it until you try it,) it’s the idea that without visibility you’re not going to be sure where network problems lie, and you’ll end up wasting money on guesswork solutions which may not actually solve the problem in the first place.
More importantly; having visibility into your network and application performance allows you to make a very shrewd business decision. Getting “the best possible performance” out of your network is good, but in reality, most often enterprise IT is tasked with finding a baseline acceptable performance, and finding the lowest possible price that it takes to achieve that performance. Of course, you can’t tell what acceptable performance is unless you know what “normal” baseline performance is, and you won’t be able to tell what’s acceptable unless you have visibility into the end-user experience.
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