Application Performance Monitoring and Application Performance Management, while being two distinct capabilities, share a common industry acronym: APM. Therefore, introducing a third use for the APM acronym risks a penalty flag for "unnecessary acronym piling on".
Application Performance Mindset is not a tool or process; rather it's a thought perspective leading to the conclusion that customers demand – having moved past expectation to intolerance – exceptionally high performing, always-on, easy to access, smooth navigating applications. Whether internal customers are using enterprise applications or external customers are hitting the company website, the demand remains and it's a business challenge that the CIO and IT team must meet.
Matching the customers' rapid shift from expectations to demands has not occurred corporately. Pete Goldin's posting on November 22 includes an Application Performance Monitoring infographic showing 54% of respondents have 25% or less of their applications monitored. That translates into the ability to reactively respond to transactional problems for a quarter or fewer business systems. (Granted, not all systems warrant application performance monitoring and the behind the scenes network, server and database monitoring provides additional watches enabling stable application delivery.)
Let us now level-set terminology. APMonitoring (APMo) leads to understanding how transactions traverse the infrastructure, reveals integration points and measures performance end-to-end from the customer perspective. APManagement (APMa) delivers strategic improvements to enhance customer experience, while reducing cost and complexity. APMindset (APMi) builds an organizational consciousness motivating participants to design and implement customer experience boosting strategies.
Instilling APMindset first requires executive insistence that application delivery – technology-enabled business services – includes focus specific to customer experience. Here is where senior IT leadership can steal moves from the CMO's playbook. Marketing executives diligently labor to fully understand how external customers interact with the company ecommerce sites. Customer Experience Management (CEM) is marketing's equal to APMo, APMa and APMi. Monitoring and Managing with a Mindset toward meeting customer insistence for great encounters stimulates marketing to relentlessly invest in customer experience advancements. IT needs to sharply focus and steer efforts to delivering successfully up and down the IT Supply Chain as the next iteration toward superior customer experience.
After securing executive sponsorship, find a pilot opportunity requiring a modest investment in product and people with a high expectation of success; nothing sells better than a winning program.
Larry Dragich's "The Anatomy of APM" model provides a conversation launch point covering key APMo and APMa elements. Adding APMindset as a virtual clean slate underlying Larry's model provides room to record necessarily different thoughts. Specifically defining a fresh mental perspective empowers team members to think radically, perceiving shifting imperatives will impel fuller discovery of impaired transactional processes, permit new optimization methods and strategic investment toward cost control, simplified process flows and improved customer experience.
