New or improved? The quality-of-service framework.With a new product that provided an attractive mix of functionality and user-friendliness, an up-and-coming provider of pharmacy software solutions began to catch the eye of some of the country's largest retail chains. They liked the product's capabilities, but were unconvinced that it could handle their high-volume, distributed processing requirements. After all, the product was developed for -- and to this point, used by -- much smaller organizations. The software company had three options: - Live with its existing capabilities, thereby limiting its ability to market its product to large chains.
- Develop a new system designed around its prospects' much-higher capacity needs -- a step that would improve competitiveness but undoubtedly would be costly and time consuming.
- Improve the existing product to meet prospective customers' needs for high-volume processing.
The fact is, in many situations, it simply is not practical -- or even necessary -- to replace an application, a system, or infrastructure in order to meet performance goals. Rather, by making carefully defined improvements to its existing technology, an organization can achieve its performance goals in a timely, cost-effective manner -- and without disrupting business or incurring costly system downtime. Technology performance: the sum of many attributes.One proven framework for addressing technology performance issues is to examine and prioritize the "quality of service" attributes that define how a system, application, or architecture “performs” relative to needs and expectations. Quality-of-service attributes include more than a dozen factors such as scalability, security, reliability, longevity, flexibility, usability, and portability. These attributes all affect performance, whether you are talking about a defined order-processing application, a broader system for storing customer data, or your underlying IT infrastructure. The exhibit (on the following page) identifies and defines 15 of the most common quality-of-service attributes. In a given environment, some attributes will be more important than others. In the case of the pharmacy software developer, scalability was of utmost concern. For a bank, system reliability and security of customer data may take precedence. For a rapidly evolving organization, the ability to add new functionality may be an overriding consideration. Or in an environment with large numbers of distributed users, usability may need to drive design decisions. Moreover, some attributes are inversely dependent, meaning that to maximize one, you may need to sacrifice others. For example, to increase speed, you may need to sacrifice some elements of system security. If security is paramount, then the need to implement audit-trail logging, use multiple firewalls, or force data transmission encryption may require trade-offs with respect to flexibility or usability. Stakeholder priorities define attribute priorities.In simple terms, you can look at these attributes as a series of levers that must be set to high, medium, or low. Finding the right balance of settings is the key to improving performance to expected levels. Interdependencies will play a role in determining the right "settings," but in many cases, cost also will be a key "equalizer." While architecturally it may be possible to optimize many of the attributes, budget limitations often force difficult decisions and trade-offs to be made. The other critical factor is gaining consensus among stakeholders with respect to priorities. Many efforts to improve system performance begin with stated goals such as, "better management, growth capacity, resiliency to periodic problems and outages, and complete sustainability in a disaster scenario." Such statements can serve as solid guiding principles for project design, but without clear understanding and agreement on the part of all stakeholders, a design inadvertently can prioritize certain elements over others, resulting in a non-tenable trade-off. Consider an effort to build an automated ordering system. The data owner may be most concerned about information security. The IT team, which is driving the project, is focused on ensuring manageability. And customers, who will use the system to conduct business with the company, value reliability and accessibility. Without incorporating the customers' input, it is very possible that the system would not provide the desired level of accessibility -- very possibly affecting the company's results. A diligent design effort, therefore, will seek the input of all relevant stakeholders -- both business and IT stakeholders internally, as well as appropriate external stakeholders, such as customers and business partners. Then it will weigh these priorities against cost to determine the appropriate balance of "settings." Once priorities are clearly defined, the company then can set measurable goals relative to the key attributes, providing a benchmark for measuring improvement. Short-term payoff. Long-term benefits.This quality-of-service framework is effective for both new design efforts and for system improvement efforts, but it is particularly useful in situations where replacing a system or application simply is not practical. In addition to providing concrete design input that can optimize system performance in the short term, this process also provides important input for the organization's IT reference architecture, thereby generating potentially greater benefits down the road. By viewing and managing system performance in the context of defined quality-of-service attributes, it becomes easier to make adjustments over time as priorities change. In addition, the exercise of prioritizing relative to specific quality-of-service attributes provides sound, realistic input for future IT investments and design initiatives. West Monroe Partners created the quality-of-service quality framework and utilizes this proprietary approach to help many organizations optimize IT and operational performance. Please contact
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