Web Performance Matters

Peter Drucker is often called "the father of modern management". Many books and Web sites are devoted to his insights, some of which I have written about previously.

This post highlights his incisive observation about the difference between effectiveness and efficiency. I have always found it to be especially memorable, and quoted it (twice) when discussing priorities and choices in my book about software performance. Unfortunately I got the source wrong, but thanks to Google I can now correct my mistake.

It appeared in Managing for Business Effectiveness, an article in the May/June 1963 edition of Harvard Business Review ("HBR"). You can also find it in a February 2006 HBR article -- What Executives Should Remember -- a collection of excerpts drawn from HBR articles by Drucker published between 1963 and 2004.

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Response Time Standards for Web Sites and Web Applications

It feels like hardly a single day has passed in the past six years that someone hasn't asked me this questions: "What is the industry standard response time for a Web page?" And in the past six years, the answer hasn't changed, not even a little bit. So if the answer hasn't changed, why am I still getting asked the question on virtually a daily basis?

That is a quote from Acceptable application response times vs. industry standard, an article by Scott Barber published by TechTarget on March 13, 2007.

As I read Scott's article, I found myself in strong agreement with every point. By the end, I realized that Scott had echoed and summarised many previous posts of mine. So I have used Scott's words as a framework to collect together references to my previous articles on the subject of performance objectives -- what they should be, and how you should set them:

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Every year, more and more shoppers turn to the Web for their holiday shopping, with total sales in 2006 projected to be in the multi-billion dollar range. But will online retailers be up to the task? Our recent study suggests that many will not.

by Ben Rushlo

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Gartner IT Maturity Model

Last week, one of my posts introduced Peter Armstrong's paper about IT-Business alignment. BMC has just published a new whitepaper by Peter -- Taking IT to the Next Level -- about the challenges IT organizations face as they evolve from a cost center to a creator of business value.

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If you research the business case for performance on the Web, eventually you're sure find yourself reading something published on a site called NextSLM.org, a site sponsored by BMC Software. One contributor is a former colleague of mine, Peter Armstrong.

Peter and I started our careers with IBM UK in the 70's as SE's supporting IMS customers. Although information technology has evolved a bit since then, our interests apparently have not diverged much. Peter now writes a BMC blog called Adopting a Service (Management) Mentality, which focuses on the increasingly important domain of how business and information technology need to work together --the area he is responsible for at BMC.

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In life, wisdom is generally thought to come with age. But in business, years of experience do not always lead to best practices. This often seems to be the case when it comes to the systematic application of performance management or service level management (SLM) practices.

Lately I've been working on the business value of SLM. In particular, I've been focusing on how to establish the value of SLM activities devoted to improving the availability and responsiveness of Web sites and e-business applications. In the process I've been speaking to several companies about how they approach this question.

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These days everyone has an opinion about aligning IT with the business. If you think I'm exaggerating, just Google that phrase and read a few of the 800+ references you get back. You will quickly see that this subject generates very strong feelings, the trajectory of which depends largely on whether the writer views the world through the prism of IT or the business.

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Web page download time and site usability

Two recent posts (here and here) have discussed the relationships among user expectations, site responsiveness, and user satisfaction. As a general rule, people's perception of a site's quality and credibility diminishes as its download times increase.

So what are the implications of this research for an organization embarking on a program of Service Level Management (SLM) or Web Performance Management? How do you keep users satisfied?

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When your business is your Web site, and site responsiveness affects customer satisfaction, how much to budget for improving site performance becomes an important business decision. Companies doing business on the Web must manage both site availability and site responsiveness.

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