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By Ben Erwin
When you talk to people in the enterprise - engineers, directors, and VPs - they've made a lot of investments in toolsets. They've either built their own internal custom data sources, or they've invested across the board in a lot of different vendors. That creates a lot of complications when they're trying to manage their network for consistent service delivery and when they try to solve problems quickly.
They're looking for more of a consolidated view in the network. There are many vendors that have made acquisitions to build in certain components into their suite. That's why two big movements in IT are third-party integration and added focus on user interface.
Third-party integration helps engineers take their existing investments, and put them all into a single location, streamlining network management, correlating data to help troubleshoot problems faster, and to give it the executive appeal to help provide consistent service delivery across all of the different data systems in the environment.
If you really don't have a structured way to integrate third party data, there's a lot of development effort required. It's not efficient to pull developers from designing the "next big thing" in order to deal with coding the apps that let you compare network data.
But integration isn't enough. It needs to be as easy as possible to manage and see integrated data. A good UI should take the incredibly complex network data, and simplify it. Engineers have very little time to get to root causes, and a streamlined process can make it a lot easier.
Across the board, some of the software programs you see on a daily basis are very complicated. Some make very simple tasks difficult with very hard to use user interfaces. Look at personal budget management software - simple task, but most of the offerings have complicated user interfaces. There really isn't a simple, easy way to manage your personal finance.
And with all the competition in the enterprise software marketplace, management vendors will need to become more focused on making products simpler to use and easier to deploy in order to distinguish themselves. One test is to develop software that even the CEO (or other executive with little technical experience) understands. An intuitive UI can help IT managers explain the problem and justify the solution to the people who have to sign off on it, which means time saved and frustration averted.
But achieving simplicity is complex. The way users interact with enterprise software is complicated. Understanding the human-computer interface for specific tasks, such as those involved in network performance management, requires a deep knowledge of how users operate and why they do what they do. This can't be garnered solely by asking questions. It requires observing them at work as they perform daily tasks, isolate and solve problems, etc., and then iterating on usability design until these tasks become intuitive and efficient.
Few software developers have really strong these usability design skills, even the most brilliant. Usability design is a different skill set than software architecture and engineering, and world-class designers are very hard to find.
Ben Erwin is Product Manager at NetQoS
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