What is the real cost of poor application performance for an enterprise? This is a question that IT managers always find tough to deal with. Whatever the aspect from which you try to catch it, it has a tendency to escape out of your hand.
Line-of-Business directors explain that when their collaborators get a poor quality of experience (QoE), not only they lose their time, but also it affects their efficiency, motivation and the average level of quality decreases. Would the employees be at the contact of customers? The business itself will be impacted. From their point of view, all these aspects combine to build a very compelling case for sustained user application performance: unavailable (blackout) or poorly performing (brownout) applications lead to enormous economic impacts for the company.
On the other hand, when carrying on our Total Savings Impact (TSI) study applied to WAN Governance in large enterprises, when it come to employees productivity, CFOs and CIOs more than often make the remark that "it is hard to evaluate", "no one will accept such high figures", or even "it's my business, let it with me please": poor performance impacts are evanescent and virtual threats that do not harm the business in a clear manner.
If we just look to employees lost time, simple math tells us that if we can save 5' per day (reasonable, isn't it?) for a 1,000 employees company, yearly paid at 50 k$, working with business applications and assuming that these 5' stay productive (why not?), the yearly savings are of 500k$+, i.e. approximately a direct gain of 1% of productivity (in other words, 5' per day represents 1% of daily working time). If we add the cost of housing, infrastructure, central services, etc. the productivity gain will even extend to other parts of the company (without speaking about more indirect impacts like customers' satisfaction and people's motivation).
Where is the truth? Of course, the easy answer is "it depends", or "who knows?" – Nevertheless it will be too disappointing to leave this topic totally unaddressed: at the end of the day, making an enterprise productive looks like eating an elephant: one bite at a time, day after day, topic after topic.
Illustration: "Le tricheur à l'as de trèfle" - Georges de La Tour (1593–1652)
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