How This Agency Improved Its Performance Application Issues

This blog post is an excerpt from our new report “The Importance of Visibility to the End User Experience.” Download the full report here.

Imagine this: A government agency is running a legacy desktop application to process citizen case files for services. The application is responsible for creating a record of each case, and maintained necessary forms for processing, reviews and approvals.

Suddenly, the application began experiencing performance issues. Work became harder for the agency, as the application took increasingly longer to process records and frequently crashed.

This not only frustrated users but caused a significant case backlog. And still there was no solution. The development team wasn’t able to easily visualize the problem. The agency, along with IT support staff, struggled to understand what was occurring from the end user perspective, meaning they couldn’t figure out what was causing the application to hang and couldn’t fix it.

If this were you, would you know how to address the issue?

The agency in this instance searched for a technology solution and eventually installed Riverbed Aternity, which allows agencies to monitor the end user experience of every enterprise app in their portfolio. Doing so allowed IT and the developers to “see” what was happening at the desktop level, per user, and then correlate it across the entire enterprise to determine if the same issue had occurred.

Over a one-year period, the agency identified 25 discrete problems. It resolved the most critical problems first – those that impacted mission attainment and then moved to less pressing issues. By the end of the year, the agency had significantly reduced the case backlog.

Because the application became much more efficient, employee satisfaction increased significantly and citizens viewed the agency as more valuable.

To learn more about how application performance management (APM) is helping agencies monitor applications, integrate processes and achieve visibility, download our full report here.