Why Performance Benchmarking Matters

Benchmarking has been in business for dozens of years. It is known well in the retail industry, where phantom shoppers visit the competition and try to get intelligence on their pricing for certain products. And for years now, this discipline has been available to organizations with web sites, using a newer discipline of Performance Benchmarking.

So what is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is an ongoing, systematic process for measuring and comparing the work processes of one institution to those of another, by bringing an external focus to internal activities, functions, or operations.

Benchmarking provides key personnel, in charge of processes, with an external standard for measuring the quality and cost of internal activities, and help identify where opportunities for
improvement may reside.

Now what is Performance Benchmarking?

Moving the classic discipline of benchmarking online, Performance Benchmarking uses various technologies to collect metrics for competing organizations in order to achieve competitive information. The first wave of Performance Benchmarking has leveraged synthetic monitoring tools from Gomez and Keynote. These companies provide the technology to systematically measure common metrics of different web sites in a way to compare them.
The most common metric used is Response Time, which measures how long it takes to download a web page. If you showed the above graph to your CEO and told him your biggest competitor was colored in Red, do you think you'd get the Content Delivery Network solution you have been begging for? Absolutely!

Benchmarking Provides Relevance

So let's try to review some real reasons to use Performance Benchmarking at your Organization:

• Quantifiable metrics. Like getting prices information, Performance Benchmarking helps you understand where you rank against key competitors with actionable metrics.
  
• Achievable Actions. When you choose to act, the results of your action should be easy to prove using the same benchmark. This allows you to determine appropriate usability and performance targets.
• Solid Framework. No more squishy "I think we are getting better"or mushy metrics like Reduced Calls to the Call Center. You can understand competitive investments that will help your site and validate the techniques in context, in real-time.
  

Benchmarking is a Critical Success Factor

Digging deeper in the relevance for benchmarking, the metrics generated by the technology and process you leverage become critical for the following reasons:

• Provides Shared Metrics. Everyone in the organization can see the results. Note the best benchmarks leverage a Business Process benchmark to really improve. This allows for alignment across the organization without every department measuring success in their own data silos.
  
• Provides Context. By focusing on the benchmark results, prioritization, decision-making and goal-setting becomes much easier when the focus and context moves from "Upgrading the Web Tier" to "Our customers now can log in twice as fast". Nothing helps your improvement project as total focus on the End User.
• Demonstrates Improvement Over Time. Once you start your benchmark, it is very easy to determine how your site is doing. Daily, weekly, monthly, and even annually. Since Gomez and Keynote provide easy-to-use web-based interfaces, everyone in the organization can get reports and emails showing how the site is doing. Good-bye to those huge dashboard projects that never get done.
  

How do you know that Performance Benchmarking will help?

Finally, you'll know when Benchmarking will help if any of these scenarios ring soundly inside your organization:

• A Lack of clear prioritization describing which parts of the web application should be improved first,
• Uncertainty regarding how best to compare against direct and indirect online competitors,
• Little focus on the competition and what relative performance means to the business,
• Only have anecdotal evidence that there is a performance gap versus the competition.

So, go out and Benchmark today!

Leverage YSlow for Performance

A couple of years ago, the smart folks at Yahoo realized a wonderful tool called YSlow. This is a plug-in for the Firefox browser that leverages another wonderful plug-in called Firebug. These two tools are a must for anyone in the business of web performance monitoring.

YSlow does a number of things, but the best place to start is the performance summary of a web page:


As you can see from the picture on the YSlow site, it will rank the web page under the YSlow 13 Performance categories. While it may not be the be-all end-all answer to solving your web performance tools, it really does give you a good start and a model to manage your web site's peformance. What is really the best part is that others can use it (since it's free to anyone) and get the same results that you do. The hardest part in discussing performance is establishing baselines to optimize and the Yahoo performance best practices are certainly worth leveraging.

But the best part of YSlow is the full object download option. Yahoo calls this the web page components, but it shows you all the objects that compose your page in a "waterfall" view, which gives you a poor man's view of performance (versus the one provided by Gomez).

The component view shows you all you need to uncover the performance hairballs of your site. All the large objects, any MIME-type mismatches, IP address of the source. Awesome.

In summary, YSlow is an amazing tool and provides the Performance Analyst a wonderful tool to help customers optimize their web sites.

Why Performance Monitoring?

In understanding Service Levels for Web Sites, moving quickly to how to measure for SLAs, we quickly turn to Performance Monitoring to see how a web site is doing. In Avinash's book, "Web Analytics An Hour A Day", he describes the Web Analytics trinity, a framework for understanding "Why customers visit", "Who actually visits", and "What Happens when they visit". I propose to expand the trinity to "How is the Web Site Doing?" and that is why we use performance monitoring.

The critical issue not found with Web Analytics is the critical metric of Time. "How are we doing?" easily goes to "When did it Happen?" Most web analysis does not account for time, since the insights are more strategic in nature. Performance Monitoring is more operational in nature to provide valuable insight into how the site is reacting "Right Now".

The Crux is the Business Process

From my background in rock climbing, the hardest part of the climb is called the 'crux'. It's the pivotal point in the whole application performance business. Why you ask? Because business people think this way, and so do the web site customers. People don't think servers and disk drives. When discussing Business Processes, IT can get the business engaged. Now you provide a Business Process, SLM-driven metric dashboard, and you've got everyone up the mountain, past the hard parts and on the path to optimal metrics and business nirvana!

The following graphic shows this exactly:

Note: This Graphic is from the following article: http://www.enterpriseleadership.org/c/journal/view_article_content?groupId=32294&articleId=36254&version=1.0.

Now let's get a bit more concrete in this. Pick your favorite web site, any site. We'll pick a few. Let's take a look at Progressive.com. (Disclosure: they were my customer at Gomez and I am a auto insurance customer). When you load their home page, take a step back from your screen and what do you see.... first I notice the words "Get a Quote". Hmm. What is this? Right. It's a quoting process, enabled to get folks quick auto quotes. Hence it's a new customer acquisition tool. Do you think this is an important business process for Progressive? You bet. Inside the company, they probably know their conversion rate for this process. Looking further, you see 'Login', which is the self-service portal. Wouldn't it make sense to monitor this login process to make sure the customer can always log in? Absolutely.

It becomes much easier to dialog about the 'login' process with customers and employees, especially on the business side. The old school IT view of talking about Weblogic Server 6788989 is slow doesn't really help anyone.

More About Business Processes

Think of a business process as a multiple page work flow or use case that end users navigate on a web site. For example, an end user who logs into their bank to look up their latest account transactions usually navigates three pages to get their answer.

In addition to monitoring breadth, business process work flows provide the richest and most valuable performance data for analytical purposes. These work flows usually require data from most of an organization's technical infrastructure, including global load balancers, web servers, application servers, message queues, and numerous database servers. Monitoring all the key business processes not only provides critical end user performance metrics, but also helps in quickly identifying performance issues in the infrastructure.

Sample Business Processes

The following processes are a sample of what you find out on the web today:

• Account Status. For many organizations, such as those in financial services, retail, or manufacturing, critical customer information such as account, order, or shipping status. This product usually requires three steps: one to login to the site, one to display the summary, and one to logout.

• Search for Product . Most sites work hard on search engines. Improving their search engine are critical to many in the retail and travel industry. Search for Product usually has two or three steps. First the keyword search box, the search results page, and then the item description.

• Account Registration. Whether registering for a site profile, online gaming, an email account, or product sweepstakes, product managers want to get people registered to deliver personalization and cross selling products later. Financial institutions are registering users for online banking and trading stocks. These products have two or three pages, one where the user enters form information and the final confirmation page.

• Service Application. A difficult product is the service application, whether applying for a credit card, filling out a tax return, health insurance claim, or consumer item rebate. These products are front ends to complex business processes. As more organizations move to compress the process time line, managing the end user and the work flow through third parties is critical.

• Shopping Cart. For retail and financial institutions, this is the key to booking revenue. Getting the customer to choose a product they desire and then get the order placed is a very important focus. These products focus on three main steps, Add to Cart, Llogin page, then navigation to final order step.

• Generate Report. Many service providers provide value by producing charts or data reports. These product managers aggressively work to improve the experience of the service. These products have three steps, beginning with a site login, navigating to a reports page, selecting report parameters, and generate the report.

As seen the attached figure, an Account Status business process can be broken down into steps that impact each part of the technical infrastructure. Building such sequence diagrams is very useful to discuss each process across internal and external organizations.

Why SLM Matters

Service Level Management (SLM) the ability to help organizations monitor application performance against a defined set of objectives agreed to by either internal or external service providers. By proactively managing SLM performance, organizations can:

• Provide a collaborative and productive environment to discuss issues
• Leverage independent metrics are easy to distribute via reports
• Focus on end user and business process perspectives rather than internal event systems

There are dozens of organizations, consultants, and web sites which discuss Service Level Management (SLM), and as usual, the terminology and your mileage will certainly vary. In the context of Optimal Metrics, SLM matters because it really helps to focus the organization and it's partners on the customers. In my Internet searching, most of the content on this topic of Service Level Management discusses the ITIL framework. It is a great framework and management tool, but it really is not a methodology. While I do like strategic frameworks, the engineer in me loves to jump into the process, technology, and people to get things done.

The closest reference I have found is 'Implementing Service Level Management' and the article has two wonderful pictures that sum up most of my approach to understanding SLM:


The summary of this great article is that the way to implement SLM is to leverage Performance Management disciplines to manage and monitor business processes.

Another way to look at SLM is from the top down. Many in IT do things the other way, from the bottom up. As the diagram shows, focusing on technology components, such as routers, switches, and servers makes for a complicated approach. How do you measure across all the devices? With a router you can measure throughput in Megabytes per second. A server can toss out SNMP trap alerts when the processor goes more than 80% busy. And what does all this do to manage the application? Event and Alert management is great for the IT Operations team to know if the component is broken, but rarely can it directly tell you that the business process is not working right.

So, in summary, the reason behind SLM is to provide metrics and management insight into the technology. This is key to running IT inside a company, or even more when outsourcing occurs. SLM disciplines are required more and more as IT is disintermediated outside of the IT department. Think about the components in your standard B2C page: analytics, ads, content, CDNs, data centers. A lot of content is outside your control, so how do you make sense of it? How do you insure the provider is doing the right thing?

Why Optimal Metrics?

In my experience in supporting Internet facing applications over the past ten years, I have observed organizations of all types (such as commercial, non-profits, education, or government) progress in their discipline to manage their Internet application service for their customers. There are many converging forces in the market that continue this progression. Certainly the current economic crisis moves companies to focus on reducing cost instead of investing in growth, but the leveraging of technology also drives other trends (such as out-sourcing labor, cloud computing and visualization, and software simplicity). This convergence of business and technical market changes also provide the opportunity to strive for optimal integration of management tools, disciplines, and most importantly, metrics.

Depending on the organization and the purpose for their web sites, each one will use different disciplines and tools. For instance, most Marketing organizations leverage Web Analytics to better drive insight into the marketing discipline. Ten years ago, the key metric was "visits" to answer the basic question of how many people were visiting the site. Visits would then justify the marketing expense of the site. Today, companies are doing more complex analysis to define metrics such as "Landing Page Bounce Rate". Today's web analytic leaders are pushing to now integrate the online and offline metrics together, trying to build more predictive and optimal models and metrics to develop leading indicators of their business.

Internet Performance Management has also established itself as a standard way to measure a site's performance with metrics such as "Response Time" or "Availability." These approaches provide baselines for key applications or web pages for many purposes. For example, they can provide early warning to detect problems before customers do, show Internet routing problems as they begin to happen, or determine if the ad vendor is slowing down the page. Most organizations use these tools to insure that their customers web experience are as best as possible. As more and more of the web site dis-intermediate to third parties, businesses are driving these tools to reduce time to respond to site issues and manage their service providers.

Business-driven management approaches such as Balanced Scorecards or Six Sigma have been successful in managing traditional business. With more and more web businesses adopting these business approaches, the key desire is to be able to integrate the strategies and tactics at the business, monitor the processes, and manage to success. Whether a rail company, airline, or online book store, merging the metrics and building effective dashboards is management nirvana.

For over forty years, from the mainframe to the Internet, organizations have applied frameworks to better manage their business. They started with Decision Support Systems, which then lead to Data Warehousing in the 1980's, and then to Business Intelligence in the 1990's, and are now moving to today's Web Intelligence. Pooling all the internal customer care systems, billing systems, and sales management systems together, building a multi-channel view of the organization, drives Web Intelligence to optimal metrics.

All these converging business and technology threads point to the strategic goal of achieving optimal metrics. When both business and technology align and are transparent to each employee or customer, organizations can finally reach the vision of true organizational integration. This blog is all about the topics on this convergence. By striving for optimal metrics within your organization, your employees and customers will excel in their online experience and love to return.