Today's focus: Is quality of experience beyond SLAs?
By Dennis Drogseth
In this column I am going to press the point that quality of
experience sets all traditional notions of service-level
agreements on their heels. Now - not later - is the time to make
the mental leap. QoE represents a fundamental shift in how SLAs
can be defined.
Taken at face value, QoE is exactly what it sounds like - the
quality of experience. "Experience" is defined in my Oxford
American Dictionary as "an actual observation of facts and
events," and, as a verb, "to observe, to share, to actually be
affected by - a feeling." What's interesting from these
definitions is that the word itself combines two very different
dimensions. One is a more empirical sense of observed reality,
while the other includes sensation and imagination - it is about
feeling.
Both definitions play in QoE - which reflects a very different
agenda than traditional SLAs. Rather than simply building from
what's measurable up to the customer or end user, QoE would
suggest starting with the end user, honoring the objective and
subjective merits of his or her experience and trying to
approximate them in metrics that can be validated in terms of
technical performance and customer behavior.
You already may be thinking that this approach is an unhealthy
combination of masochism and naiveté, but I would argue just the
opposite - it is the shortest path to comfort and mental health
for you and your customers.
Business productivity, customer loyalty, and business
partnerships depend on QoE in all its dimensions. No one will
stick with a provider that gets gold stars for SLAs but still
leaves them experientially discontent - especially if other
options present themselves. By trying to force you and your
customers to live in a simulated universe in which only
technical metrics apply, it is you who are being naïve. Sure,
you will need to "manage" expectations and set some technical
boundaries, but your ability to do this successfully is greatly
enhanced once you approach the problem in terms of
multi-dimensional experience rather than introverted technical
specifications.
A few pointers and observations:
* Listen to your customers. While the old-fashioned help desk
approach is often reactive and cumbersome, it can also provide
useful background on customer perceptions and requirements. A
strong, proactive service initiative will also help to promote
dialog and interaction.
* Recognize that while availability and performance remain prime
factors, there are other dimensions to QoE - such as
consistency, cost to the customer, security, flexibility (e.g.,
mobility of a service, or customer choice of service), and
variety (number of available and customer-relevant services).
This is not a finite list - because the dimensions of experience
are not finite.
* Look at options for testing responsiveness. Since degraded
service has proven to be more of a customer turnoff than
intermittent spurts of lack of availability, performance and QoE
are probably the two most closely linked metrics. Until fairly
recently, synthetic transaction analyses were the top choice for
QoE validation, and they do still play a role. Synthetic
transactions provide IT with a self-contained context for
control. You can set the time and frequency and define SLAs
accordingly - and of course synthetic transactions are superior
for testing availability.
New technologies - including slimmer, more efficient agent
technology, more advanced server-based transaction analysis, and
significant advances in techniques for packet analysis - are
making observed transactional baselining more possible. Unlike
synthetic transactions, observed baselining can inform you, on a
dynamic basis, of actual customer behavior and customer
disaffection - for example, when transactions are aborted due to
impatience. Some techniques are now highly scalable in capturing
individual user behaviors as well as infrastructure performance
in large, geographically dispersed environments.
These are just a few points. I invite your comments and opinions
as well, and welcome intelligent disagreement and notes of
support.
Oh, and to answer the question posed in the headline: in my
opinion, the glorious and troublesome fact is that QoE is indeed
beyond SLAs, which can only, at best, approximate it - and
that's because experience, itself, is more sprawling than the
Internet, and more complex than all the data centers in the
world.
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