ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES®
Analyst Corner
November 2008 EMA Analyst’s Corner:
New QoE Research Reveals Why QoE Initiatives Are on a Fast-Track for Growth
There are a lot of terms circulating across the market to describe how to set up metrics for evaluating application and network services as they impact the end user experience. No doubt, the most established is Quality of Service or QoS. This term has taken on a fairly technical, bandwidth-centric definition where it remains valuable as a metric but, as such, is far from summing up what really counts in the eyes of the end user. There are other terms like RUM or “real user monitoring” that are technical but at least focus on a series of monitoring technologies targeted at the “real user” or “end user.”
Then there’s Quality of Experience or QoE, which is not centered in technology but in the flesh-and-blood experience of the user consuming IT services. This focus is a lot like Mean Opinion Score (MOS) was originally intended as it applied to telecommunications services. The dimensions of understanding QoE can be as complex and differentiated as you might expect once you combine human “sensibilities” with a wide range of IT services. The heart of the problem is most often focused around application or service response times, which now leads availability 65% to 63% respectively as a QoE metric. This data is part of the latest EMA research report on QoE - The Advent of QoE: Business and IT Priorities.
This recent Enterprise Management Associates’ research targeted 207 managers, executives and professionals from both IT and business backgrounds. The research indicates an accelerating growth curve for QoE initiatives – one that’s not likely to abate even in tough economic time. QoE, after all, is a “highly scalable” means to enhanced productivity and, in many cases, revenue generation and brand loyalty. It’s arguably one of the most efficient investments that IT and business planners can make.
The research targeted both groups: IT and business planners, including line of business executives and other professionals, as well as business roles in planning e-commerce, people performance professionals (who help to ensure that end-users really are productive), and process and compliance professionals also focused on corporate or public sector productivity.
Some of the highlights of the research are:
- 79% of the respondents viewed QoE as becoming more important to their organizations. Only 2% see it as becoming less important.
- 71% view QoE as both a business and technology concern – while 19% view it as primarily a business concern and only 11% view it as primarily a technology concern.
- 47% already claim to have integrated teams between business constituencies and IT.
- 45% of business respondents (those with clearly non-IT roles) were involved in dialog with IT sufficiently enough to be “aware of instrumentation and unique technical environments.”
- The lead driver across all verticals was employee productivity, not surprisingly, at 23%. Business competitiveness and/or revenue generation was close though, at 20%, and brand protection and customer satisfaction garnered 14% of total votes. BSM and SLM initiatives came in very low (at 4% and 2% respectively) – but SLAs remain popular business metrics.
- Most QoE solutions not only capture issues with the user experience but begin to help to solve the problem of where to focus diagnostic efforts. EMA, along with many others in the industry, calls this “triage.” And supporting triage is, as expected, very important to our respondents – 77% of whom felt that triage was either “very” or “extremely” important.
- And just how important is QoE again? When asked what they’d do differently – the top choice, at 43% was “We wished we started our QoE initiative sooner.” The second choice was to focus on “better coordination between the business and IT.”
These are just a few highlights from upcoming report - The Advent of QoE: Business and IT Priorities. The goal of the report is to help IT and business planners lay out guidelines for more effective QoE initiatives by evaluating how and what your peers are doing in everything from organizational leadership to technology instrumentation and placements. The report will be complemented by a QoE Solution Center coming later this month targeted at helping you to select the QoE technologies most appropriate to you.
And the data is resoundingly clear. It shows that many of you have already awakened to the fact that if “business alignment” for IT is to be more than a cliché then effective QoE needs to be one of the beacons to light the way.
