Business Drivers

Business operations and business goals depend on the performance of applications. An application’s performance, as experienced by business end users, is the result of capabilities provided by multiple IT components and services from contractors managed by CMS.

Goals

The business goals for using IT PM are to continuously:

  • Improve uptime, responsiveness, accuracy, quality, security, and timeliness of the customer experience.

  • Process CMS business workloads efficiently and effectively.

  • Enhance and improve the use of IT resources to control and reduce costs over time.

IT PM supports the business by providing insight into the operation of IT systems. The information gathered through IT PM allows CMS to:

  • Translate business goals into IT operational level agreements (OLA). Performance standards in OLAs must be grounded in the requirements of business operations and business goals.

  • Support government oversight of SLAs with applicable IT PM data and reports when the collection of the IT PM data is practical and unobtrusive.

  • Use IT PM data in planning and allocation of application resources to avoid over-provisioning when acquiring or allocating hardware and network resources.

Common Capabilities

IT PM includes tools and methods that measure the end-to-end performance of an application and each of its components. End-to-end performance measurements inform IT and business management whether end users are currently or are likely to be experiencing performance issues with an application. IT PM tools and methods provide capabilities that can elevate the quality of IT services in several key ways. For example, IT PM:

  • Provides operators with real-time status of an application’s monitored performance metrics

  • Presents information by application, not just by data center components

  • Measures and reports on service levels from an end-user perspective

  • Enables operators to discern the service- and business-level impact of events

  • Gives operators the cross-platform visibility and impact analysis capabilities needed to prioritize responses and improve service availability

  • Allows correlation of multiple performance events and their user impact to business processes

  • Allows detection of developing application and service performance problems before they result in wide impact to end users

  • Enables forecasting near-term behavior that might have an adverse impact on performance