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IT and ebusiness groups alike know that successfully launching extensive retail sites with upgraded functionality every season is no mean feat. Once the application is designed, not only must it be tested and proven, but it also must be constantly monitored for performance and customer impact. For this reason, effective SLM strategies encompass three critical stages: service-level planning, readiness assessment, and delivery. Setting competitive and reasonable service-level expectations Once a retailer decides to offer a new tool or enhanced service online, it must set performance expectations and standards to define how the application's success or failure will be judged. For example, the retailer might conclude during this phase that an acceptable transaction time for online checkout is two seconds or less, or that ad download times must be sub-second. It is extremely important that both ebusiness and IT teams work closely together at this stage to define competitive-yet reasonable-performance standards and problem resolution clauses in the form of concrete service level agreements (SLAs) for new applications. In the past, SLAs have been defined somewhat differently by IT and business groups, often resulting in unrealistic or unmet expectations. For example, IT groups have traditionally defined SLAs in relation to the performance of network components, servers, and CPUs as well as network usage, while e business groups have set them without completely understanding actual infrastructure capabilities. Ideally, SLAs should be defined competitively within the context of industry benchmarks while also taking into account historical data and the capabilities of an organization's IT infrastructure. In this manner, retailers can set competitive SLAs that can be used as effective tools to further enhance their offline brands. Assessing readiness and planning required capacity For new applications, this stage goes hand-in-hand with the service-level planning stage for enhanced applications with available historical performance data, this stage should follow the planning stage. When the service-level expectations for an upgraded retail site or new value-added module have been determined and the application is ready for launch, application deployment teams must ensure that the underlying technology infrastructure is capable of delivering upon the desired service-level expectations given the expected user load. To do so, application support teams must test and assess the application's readiness and plan for the required capacity. If testing reveals any issues or problems that prevent the application from being launched, further determination activities must be used to pinpoint exactly where failures are occurring so that issues can be quickly resolved and the application can brought to market by the expected timeline. This phase is also extremely vital for retailers planning large marketing and advertising campaigns. Before attempting to drive additional traffic to its site for a spring sale or free shipping offer, a retailer must carefully examine its anticipated user mix and load, and carefully assess whether its Web infrastructure is ready to support that traffic at acceptable standards. If not, and customers are unable to reach the site or receive acceptable service levels, precious advertising dollars could go to waste as disappointed customers abandon their shopping carts and turn to competitive sites. Keynote website performance, and cloud monitoring to improve the online user experience.
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