Starting with customer experience: A top down approach

Having delivered a number and a variety of infrastructure management solutions, if I were to take a greenfield approach (do it all over again), taking a top down approach would be a more feasible one. Measuring the customer experience would be the first step, at least across a selected set of critical business services or applications.

The business case would be relatively easier as an increased visibility of customer experience of business service or application, whether negative or positive, is something that is understood easier.

Understood easier in comparison to taking a bottom up approach of ensuring the management of every infrastructure component, decomposed to the nth degree. To start with infrastructure management, then to undertake service modelling and then to understand the service impacts, although equally valid as a means, would take a longer path to business visibility and appreciation. Whereas, the immediate visibility of customer experience measurement and reporting helps quickly socialise the concepts and then use that visibility as a driver to then decompose into the underlying infrastructure elements.

Customer experience measurement can be achieved via a number of mechanism, typically via synthesizing the user transaction (active) or/and network traffic analysis at the application layer (passive). A combination of the two would also be a good mechanism, that would then assist with analysis and diagnostics.

The approach would be generic and equally applicable, whether it is across a critical set of online application transactions by a user or a SIP based VoIP service transaction. Both would derive user experience measurements.

The customer experience first approach would also form as a benchmark for assessing the positive impact of implementing more granular infrastructure management (server, database, process, application, network infrastructure, traffic performance & route analytics) at the lower layers. Such management improvements should be reflected in the continuous measurement of customer experience of service.