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Who's Doing Your ECM QA? Your Users?

Dave Gibson

End users are increasingly demanding. Not many years ago, expectations for apps and performance were set by experience with in-house systems. Now, users’ expectations are set by social media interaction in terms of interfaces and performance. Everyone expects high-performance access – both in their personal lives and for their knowledge worker applications.

ECM (Enterprise Content Management) systems, and their supporting IT and application teams, know this all too well. How often have you heard, “It’s taking forever to download a document,” or “search is taking forever!”

Two big problems are revealed - what do these ambiguous performance comments mean in terms of measured ECM application service levels AND why are you hearing about this problem from your end user? These problems lead to more questions. How do you diagnose the issue? What does forever mean? Why does the user know about their performance problems before you do?

The recent survey, Managing and Monitoring Business-Critical Content and Capture Applications, executed by AIIM and Reveille revealed critical statistics about these concerns.

■ 72% of organizations said their current performance monitoring was “manual – triggered by incidents/support calls.”

■ Of the companies surveyed, only 20% had dedicated content monitoring products that helped them find ECM-specific problems before their end users are affected.

■ Systems with 1000+ users created 60-150 support tickets per month.

This might be one reason that adoption and expansion of ECM solutions is such a challenge for organizations. According to a Forrester Global Enterprise Content Management and Archiving Online survey, “48% find user adoption of existing ECM solutions to be a challenge facing their organization”. (Five Key Trends That Are Shaping How We Manage Enterprise Content, Forrester Research, Inc., September 19, 2014)

Rethinking QA – Ongoing, Not One-Time

To get ahead of these support calls and improve end-user satisfaction, ECM support teams need to proactively manage their ECM application performance. Say goodbye to the days of testing only prior to upgrades and migrations, with ideal use cases, and a limited set of users. Say good riddance to relying on synthetic logins and scripts to tell you (by simulation) what your end-users are experiencing after deployment. And yes, let’s drop ambiguous performance descriptions like slow and “forever.”

In today’s demanding environment, with new case management and workflow-based applications, ECM applications are becoming increasingly mission-critical. Here are the top four items you need to know about your ECM environment to support continuous improvement and ensure your end users aren’t the ones dong your QA:

■ Know actual, named end-user's experience by having insight into their real-time transactions and response times.

■ Know your systems actual usage – both volume and transactions for a normal operations and peak loading scenarios.

■ Know when a problem is about to strike by leveraging thresholds, so you can be alerted when performance is starting to falter, before end-users feel the impact.

■ Know how to correlate issues between ECM platform performance and your end-user experience to more quickly diagnose problems.

There are many other important aspects to managing your ECM – benchmarking, trending, automatic repairs and more – but by focusing on the actual end-user experience, you’ll be one step closer to ensuring peak ECM performance and widespread adoption.

Dave Gibson is COO of Reveille Software.

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Who's Doing Your ECM QA? Your Users?

Dave Gibson

End users are increasingly demanding. Not many years ago, expectations for apps and performance were set by experience with in-house systems. Now, users’ expectations are set by social media interaction in terms of interfaces and performance. Everyone expects high-performance access – both in their personal lives and for their knowledge worker applications.

ECM (Enterprise Content Management) systems, and their supporting IT and application teams, know this all too well. How often have you heard, “It’s taking forever to download a document,” or “search is taking forever!”

Two big problems are revealed - what do these ambiguous performance comments mean in terms of measured ECM application service levels AND why are you hearing about this problem from your end user? These problems lead to more questions. How do you diagnose the issue? What does forever mean? Why does the user know about their performance problems before you do?

The recent survey, Managing and Monitoring Business-Critical Content and Capture Applications, executed by AIIM and Reveille revealed critical statistics about these concerns.

■ 72% of organizations said their current performance monitoring was “manual – triggered by incidents/support calls.”

■ Of the companies surveyed, only 20% had dedicated content monitoring products that helped them find ECM-specific problems before their end users are affected.

■ Systems with 1000+ users created 60-150 support tickets per month.

This might be one reason that adoption and expansion of ECM solutions is such a challenge for organizations. According to a Forrester Global Enterprise Content Management and Archiving Online survey, “48% find user adoption of existing ECM solutions to be a challenge facing their organization”. (Five Key Trends That Are Shaping How We Manage Enterprise Content, Forrester Research, Inc., September 19, 2014)

Rethinking QA – Ongoing, Not One-Time

To get ahead of these support calls and improve end-user satisfaction, ECM support teams need to proactively manage their ECM application performance. Say goodbye to the days of testing only prior to upgrades and migrations, with ideal use cases, and a limited set of users. Say good riddance to relying on synthetic logins and scripts to tell you (by simulation) what your end-users are experiencing after deployment. And yes, let’s drop ambiguous performance descriptions like slow and “forever.”

In today’s demanding environment, with new case management and workflow-based applications, ECM applications are becoming increasingly mission-critical. Here are the top four items you need to know about your ECM environment to support continuous improvement and ensure your end users aren’t the ones dong your QA:

■ Know actual, named end-user's experience by having insight into their real-time transactions and response times.

■ Know your systems actual usage – both volume and transactions for a normal operations and peak loading scenarios.

■ Know when a problem is about to strike by leveraging thresholds, so you can be alerted when performance is starting to falter, before end-users feel the impact.

■ Know how to correlate issues between ECM platform performance and your end-user experience to more quickly diagnose problems.

There are many other important aspects to managing your ECM – benchmarking, trending, automatic repairs and more – but by focusing on the actual end-user experience, you’ll be one step closer to ensuring peak ECM performance and widespread adoption.

Dave Gibson is COO of Reveille Software.

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As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...