Service assurance means business survival

Did you know? Ten seconds is the limit for keeping a user`s attention focused on an interaction with a computer - longer than that and they will want to perform other tasks while they`re waiting.

Did you know? Internet prospects who are kept waiting for more than about eight seconds by a Web transaction are likely to take their business elsewhere.

Did you know? These are some of the issues that can - and should - be addressed through the correct application of service assurance.

So says Richard Hepplestone, application performance management consultant at Compuware SA, who maintains that service assurance can deliver dramatic improvements in business transaction processing time - improvements that translate into solid commercial gains.

"Service assurance is a new favourite buzzword - but it has a real purpose: it`s whether applications meet all the business requirements, user expectations and service-level commitments," he explains.

According to Hepplestone, pre-production service assurance has a direct impact on the end-user`s experience of an application.

"It can make the difference between a system that is a torment to use and one that is a convenient, effective aid to completing business processes. As a result, and in other ways too, service assurance can deliver efficiencies to any business that relies on IT.

"In addition, service assurance is a bonus to end-users because it can reduce the time an application takes to complete a transaction. These reductions are always noticeable, and can be of considerable scale," he adds.

It is not hard to see that a reduction of some magnitude would completely change an application`s usability. In fact, ergonomic research shows that relatively small differences in response time are critical to how an application is experienced.

"Faster is better - if the application service can respond within one second, the user`s flow of thought remains uninterrupted. If the response can be got down to a tenth of a second, then the user experiences the response as instantaneous.

"However, it is not just that users are more attentive when their dialogue with the computer is fast. The time when they are waiting for the application to refresh is often, to all intents and purposes, time wasted. Organisations need to be aware of the commercial implications of this dead time, and of the gains to be had from eliminating it," he says.

Another way in which service assurance impacts the bottom line concerns other end-users - customers and prospects who are conducting, or considering conducting business, with the company via its Web site. When response is sluggish, a customer talking to a call centre operator can usually be kept on the line with small talk (usually about how slowly the computer is running today). By contrast, Internet prospects who are kept waiting for more than about eight seconds by a Web transaction are likely to take their business elsewhere.

Hepplestone says service assurance is now a mature discipline within many larger organisations, and as it gets more sophisticated, business processes can become even more streamlined.

For example, it would be usual to analyse a business process in terms of its constituent IT transactions and user "wait states". The process may well be used differently depending on user type (in a call centre, operator, supervisor and so on); for each type, the process and the steps within it need to be related to that user`s other activities throughout the day.

"In this way organisations can create a highly detailed and accurate picture of how each transaction will be used and how it will perform, once the application goes live. They can then make any appropriate adjustments to application or infrastructure before go-live day because once users (and support staff) have experienced an application as slow, it is very hard to regain their confidence, even when the problem has been corrected.

"And if, as unfortunately still happens, an application has to be withdrawn because of performance problems after it is live, the effect on both morale and costs can be dire.

"Pre-production service assurance offers the promise of productive users, efficient business processes and sizeable cost savings: it is more than a buzzword - it could be key to business survival," he concludes.