One of the defining characteristics of the digital economy is the emphasis on user experience. Whether it is the experience associated with the use of a mobile app or the enterprise application used by back office staff, there is growing acceptance by the CIO and the leadership team that to increase user adoption requires enhancing the user experience.
Forrester’s Andrew Hogan noted that “companies are adopting human-centric methods and abandoning touchpoint-by-touchpoint, feature-focused approaches.”
The increased variety of applications (CRM, ERP, supply chain, etc), platforms (cloud, hybrid, multi-) or channels (desktop, voice, connected devices), creates greater complexity as organisations try to anticipate user preference. The feature/function bloatware also hampers other experience metrics such as performance and availability.
There is a need to go back to basics. As Hogan commented: “many [enterprises] have decided to design with human needs as their focus rather than checking all potential feature boxes.”
In this context FutureCIO spoke to Tony Sandberg, regional director for Asia Pacific at Kemp, on the role of technologies application performance management tools and techniques in achieving desired user experience benchmarks.
Definition
Sandberg commented that there are thousands of applications that staff use to communicate, collaborate, and engage with customers, business partners, and companies themselves.
The focus of application experience (AX) is to ensure that these applications work, and more importantly, do not hamper employees in the performance of their jobs.
“A lot of our [Kemp] focus is to make it as easy as possible for the people managing these applications, including management systems, without disregarding the security aspects of the business. This is regardless whether the environment is on-prem, in the cloud, hybrid or multi-cloud,” he added.
Importance
Businesses today rely on applications to conduct business. “For banks, for instance, have consumer facing applications that are deemed mission-critical. These applications cannot be allowed to go down [be unavailable] as it will impact customer experience,” noted Sandberg.
Internal to most organisations, he added that applications like email, and business-critical applications like CRM cannot be allowed to go down because it’s a core part of the company and the organisations today.
Challenges
Kemp commissioned Forrester to survey 150 enterprise business and technology decision-makers in Asia Pacific on the impact of multi-cloud adoption trends on AX. The report noted that over 84% of CIOs believe multi-cloud will constitute up to 50% of their hosting environment in the next three years, up from an average of less than 30% in 2019.
The study also noted that core applications are migrating to the cloud. Sandberg commented however that on-prem will remain in the picture for the foreseeable future. This hybrid with multi-cloud infrastructure presents a complex management challenge for enterprises.
Another challenge for the infrastructure team is maintain visibility of the applications running across this multi-platform environment.
“Today, you need to know where all the applications are, how many applications which are mission-critical, and which are less mission-critical. You also need to look at the application delivery controllers. How supplies these ADCs and how to you ensure the AX is flawless,” he pondered.
Ownership
Research by Everest Group found that Shadow IT now comprise 50% or greater of IT spending. Gartner suggests that this is growing at between30 to 40% of IT spending for large enterprises.
This proliferation of applications, sanctioned or not, running on the company’s infrastructure architecture is expected to continue into 2020.
Regardless of who owns the application, the responsibility for ensuring that systems and applications are running smoothly falls on the shoulder of the infrastructure team,” said Sandberg.
Advise
When defining what their application experience, Sandberg suggest organisations include identifying the goals that the company wants to achieve, the environments from which applications will reside, as well as the management and security of each application.
He noted that enterprises are no longer limited to the traditional perpetual licensing model. “Today you can use pay-as-you-use, so look into your environment, and understand what is best for you, what makes most sense, he concluded.
Into 2020 and beyond
Gartner opined that the “one-size-fits-all” approach to application deployment and usage created uneven utilisation of often expensive enterprise applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), sales force automation tools, and supply chain management systems.
Regardless of their function in the enterprise, all staff operated within the same business application. The analyst group said employees fit their job to the application — sometimes to the detriment of their own job. The result is uneven application utilisation, disappointment on both camps – user and management, and unmet ROIs.
Gartner predicts that by 2023, “40% of professional workers will orchestrate their business application experiences and capabilities like they do their music streaming services.”
But enterprises don’t have to wait to 2023. There is opportunity today for CIOs to work alongside the infrastructure team to build an architecture that supports the business’ drive to support a customer-centric, customer-experience model. And this begins with enhancing how employees adopt and utilise the enterprise infrastructure and application available to them.
For vendors like Kemp, automation will play an important role in the delivery of enhanced application experience. “You will see greater use of automation as well as integrated management towards the realisation of the desired outcome,” predicted Kemp.
