App performance issues plague Aussie business

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 29 November 2009 10:20

IT Industry - Market

Just over 57 percent of Australian businesses and organisations experience more than one application performance issue every week, with 11.5 percent of them experiencing ‘almost constant’ issues with their IT systems.


According to Compuware’s  Sydney-based Business Service Management Evangelist,  Rafi Katanasho, the company’s third national IT service management survey revealed that “current approaches to ensuring application performance are, at worst, inadequate or, at best, not improving fast enough” to keep up with the increasing complexity of application environments.

Katanasho says that “the problem with traditional approaches to managing IT service is that they do not typically provide visibility in the health of an application as seen by the business.

"This was shown by the survey in the over-reliance on the help desk for front-line awareness of application performance issues. By the time a performance problem is reported to the help desk, it is already too late to prevent customers being affected."

According to Compuware, with weekly issues to attend to, organisations, on average, have six people involved in the troubleshooting, diagnosis and resolution process, and 51 percent of organisations only become aware of IT application performance issues when end users report problems to the help desk.

Katanasho said that a small number of organisations in the survey have implemented end user experience monitoring tools which provide an “accurate measurement of the level of service being provided to end users.

“By starting from the end-user's perspective organisations can better concentrate IT resources on activities that directly benefit the business and, in particular, address the problems most are experiencing with external customer satisfaction and support costs.”

Katanasho also said that, in response to the application performance and customer satisfaction issues reported by Australian organisations, Compuware has launched a "Fast Track" Solution - the Vantage 11 BSD readiness assessment – which he said provides an initial assessment service for  $6,600 to identify key strategies, such as monitoring end user experience, to measure and improve an organisation's business service delivery.

Other findings of the Compuware survey include:

•    On average, 57% of issues across all organisations are resolved in an acceptable time period, and 43% in a time period which is not acceptable

•    75% of respondents reported that poor performance negatively impacts external customer satisfaction and 72% said it increases costs to the business.