System Performance – Is it important to the business?
Are the business owners or stakeholders in your organization making inquiries concerning your existing business systems such as:
- Where is our staff spending an unnecessary amount of time on inefficient or undefined business processes?
- What are the most common system performance problems impacting our business?
- What areas of our existing IT solutions are most often experiencing system downtime, performance issues, etc., and therefore require the most attention by IT?
- What steps are we taking to isolate the root cause of a system downtime, performance problem, inefficient business process, etc.? Are they preventative or reactive steps?
- What is the cost to our business as a result having system downtime, performance problems, inefficient business processes, etc.?
- Is the cost being measured? If so, how is it being measured?
- Are there published performance Service Level Agreements (SLA) and if so, are they being followed?
- Is there adequate monitoring tools and processes that will allow the costs to be measured?
- Who owns the task of resolving the problems? (recognition of ownership would seem obvious but is surprisingly unknown)
Questions concerning cost to the business are difficult to measure and therefore most often unknown or ignored.
Regardless of the type of services engagement with Never Summer Innovations (e.g., business process automation, architecture assessment, performance tuning, etc.), we highly recommend the first steps involve an assessment of current cost and how those costs could be reduced as a result of recommended improvements. The illustration at the beginning of Our Services, depicts an overall methodology used in any Never Summer Innovations service engagement. The costs / benefits of making change at all stages of an engagement is one of several key principles that should be continually assessed.
