News

More focus on performance needed: Forrester

• By Lana Gates
• March 3, 2004

A recent Forrester Consulting study chartered by Compuware Corp., Farmington Hills, Mich., reveals that many IT organizations are still reactive rather than proactive in solving performance problems.

The Performance Management Market study surveyed 430 senior IT executives from large companies in both the U.S. and Europe and focused on how IT organizations approach performance management of their critical business applications.

The survey set out to discover the answers to three primary questions, according to John Williams, Compuware's Vantage product line director. Key questions in the survey were: How does an IT organization know when it has performance problems that impact the business? Could companies accurately assess business impact when they did have performance problems? And how do companies approach problem resolution?

Results of the study reveal that the predominant approach to solving these problems is still through help desk calls. In fact, results indicate that 67% of the survey's respondents are typically unaware that a problem exists until an end user calls the help desk. Another 6% revealed that they become aware of a problem when they receive management complaints.

"That's in spite of the fact that the vast majority recognized the criticality of data," Williams noted. "Only a minority of them are relying on that as a primary source of information."

Not surprisingly, Compuware is using the findings to push its Vantage product, which is said to measure business-relevant metrics in terms of end-user response time and availability, and helps the user deliver the appropriate response to the appropriate situation.