IT needs to understand users better, says CA Technologies

Operations grapple with need for end-to-end visibility, but this must be allied with a close understanding of the user experience in order for IT to properly align with the business, says software company

IT people know that they need to focus on delivering a good service, but they also need to understand the user experience more closely, according to CA Technologies.

Speaking at Computing's recent Cloud and Infrastructure Summit, Duncan Bradford, vice president EMEA pre-sales, CA Technologies (pictured), explained how IT need to understand both the ‘inside out' view, and the ‘outside in'.

Starting with the former, he explained that IT needs operational agility, to optimise resources in terms of capacity and right-sizing, and to allow innovation.

"To do that you need to track your SLAs, and have end-to-end view of capacity and performance insight so you can predict what the needs of the business will be," said Bradford. "With this perspective you can improve things like meantime to repair, and reduce the user impact of problems.

"Once we have all of this under control, then you could say we have the ‘inside-out' view catered for, the view of everything within our data centre," he said.

But, he added, IT also needs to have the ‘outside-in' view.

"IT needs to move away from just understanding end-to-end visibility, to understanding what the user is doing when interacting digitally with the organisation. Then it can improve digital performance, and offer the business an understanding of how to improve the design of digital services to further improve that user experience. So look both inside-out and outside-in," argued Bradford.

Responding to an audience member who questioned the need for external monitoring tools when services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer in-built solutions, he explained that this only works if you exclusively consume services from that provider.

"If I only ever used AWS, then it's fine to just use their Cloud Watch service, but even then there are some restrictions in terms of how long they store that data. But it's a heterogenous world out there, you don't just use a single platform, so you don't get that full end-to-end view [just from AWS]."

"Ultimately you need something which allows you to unify platforms, which can span across them all, and have an open perspective to bring in new platforms," he added.

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