Tuesday 14 October 2014

Managing User-Experience in the App Economy



In today's competitive app economy, user-experience is one of the crucial differentiators between leaders and laggards in the market. As disruptive forces are constantly at work; corporations recognize that they have to work hard to gain new customers - and to maintain the loyalty of their existing ones. Consequently, these corporations seek to form 1:1 relationships with their stakeholders by means of an intimate customer experience.

During the last decade, another fundamental force has been shaping how consumers interact socially. User-experience is now widely shared and is typically present at the point of purchase/install. However these reviews are consulted, it is certain that they can either help or hinder market penetration and, ultimately, brand.

In days gone by, quality of an IT service was often measured by percentile.  A typical doctrine would define a service level where 90% of the responses were completed within 3 seconds. This type of logic, however, doesn't consider the social impact of the user-experience of the remaining vociferous 10%. Analytics will be needed to identify and then address this sector with remedial customer service.

The appropriate question that remains is - "how much investment do you put into managing user-experience, and what are the risks if you fail?"

Credit to simonmiller.co.uk for the photo

Re-Branding the Blog

I've decided to rebrand this blog; which used to be titled "Cloud Capacity", which in all honesty was probably a bit vague for its purpose. Considering the content, I've decided to focus more on the area of 'rebranding' capacity management and it's role in IT supply chain.

The simple reality is that the IT trends have been moving towards a tiered model of operation for some time now, and capacity management has to find its role as "end to end" management of apps, infrastructure and datacenters has dwindled with a variety of IT sourcing alternatives gain market share.

Also we must recognise that many of these changes have been borne out of business drivers to create an agile, cost-effective delivery mechanism. What I'm becoming more interested in researching is - how do we harness those drivers and seek to add value to them with data and analytics.

The next 12 months I shall be investigating several topics around workload management, financial management and the balance of quality against agility. Enjoy, dear reader, enjoy!