As information passes through and upward through a company, it is filtered, shaped, refined down to the one salient decision point that all the executives can then discuss. The concern that I have is whether the devolution of detail within organizations stifles their ability to innovate, especially in times of stress.

Small companies have a short distance from those that create and work with the product to the senior levels. As a result, senior managers and executives are tightly tied to the details of the product, of the company, of the customers. They understand that details are important.

Mature companies discuss how their strategies and initiatives will shape an entire industry and change the way everyone does business. But how that happens is often lost as those concepts flow downward. Just as detail devolves on the way up, detail evolves on the way down.

It is nigh on impossible to participate in an industry-defining paradigm shift when your everyday activities double and triple, leading to a complete dissociation between the executive level and the worker level.

Why does this occur?

Its not that detail devolves on the way up an organization, but rather that each level needs to assure each higher level that everything is ok and that solutions can be found for those issues that may be challenging, so lets just keep pressing forward.

So the devolution of detail coupled with the culture of assurance gets too many companies in trouble.

The devil is in the details. And sometimes, the devil can be your friend.

When I step back and examine these concepts, free of involvement in the world of Brand creation and propagandization, Branding and Brands degenerate to the most basic definition of the terms: the painful act of marking an object as something you own.

Viewed in this way, Branding is painful, permanent, and performed against the will of the object/being being inflicted with the Brand. It is a one-way act. A Brand is forced on a being/object, without any opportunity for a reciprocal act.

Corporate Branding is the same. Branding is not a conversation. As I have said previously (here), a Brand and the act of Branding is read-only, closed-source. The Brand is shaped and formed to uniquely identify its owner, and then it is placed with pride wherever the Brand-owner sees fit.

While a Brand is owned, and Branding marks those objects as belonging to the Brand owner, it is not a conversation. Reputation is a conversation. And conversations that occur about Brands seal their Reputations.

Wear your Brand. But then talk about it with others. You may find that the Brand is not what defines the company to the people who see it.

Galileo Galilei

The greatest challenge facing companies today is not finding ways to measure performance. The key issue is one of understanding what should be measured and validating that there is agreement on what the purpose of the measurement is.

Organizations are complex. And with complexity arises the need to gather data for different purposes. In my series discussing Why Web Measurements?, I broke organizations down into four groups, each one having distinctly different needs for measurements and data. While this series focuses on Web performance, the four categories (Customer Generation, Customer Retention, Business Operations, and Technical Operations) can be broadly applied to all aspects of your business.

In each of the four categories, whether it is for Web performance or financial analysis, determining what and why to measure is a critical predecessor to the establishment of measurements and the examination of data.

2009 will be a year of reflection and retrenchment. Companies will be examining all aspects of their business, all of their relationships with vendors, all of the ways they measure themselves. The question that must be asked before succumbing to the rushing panic of cost-cutting and layoffs is: Do you fundamentally understand why and what you measure and what it is really telling you?

A consultant (from the Latin consultare means “to discuss” from which we also derive words such as consul and counsel) is a professional who provides advice in a particular area of expertise….

A consultant is usually an expert or a professional in a specific field and has a wide knowledge of the subject matter. A consultant usually works for a consultancy firm or is self-employed, and engages with multiple and changing clients. Thus, clients have access to deeper levels of expertise than would be feasible for them to retain in-house, and to purchase only as much service from the outside consultant as desired.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consultant

What this definition misses is that a good consultant, especially in a small firm, is not simply a person with specific subject-matter expertise and therefore a subject-matter expert (SME), a consultant is a jack-of-all-trades.

A simple list of skills needed by a good consultant include:

• Sales
• Project Management
• Product Management
• Educator
• Trainer
• Mentor and Coach
• Business Manager
• Subject-Matter Expert

In large consulting organizations, these functions are broken out into specific team members. In a small consultancy, everyone has to be able to manage all of these items.

And then there is another leap: How does a consultant move to being an evangelist? These two roles are substantially different.

While both are SMEs, an evangelist takes that one final step from being a functional expert who is able to make things happen and work in a product to a place where they can stand in front of any audience and make the product sing. It is not just able the abilty to do anymore; it is about the ability to show.

Go through the list of people that you or your organization work with. Do you work with true consultants, SMEs, or evangelists? Which group is most effective in helping your organization get better?  Are you using consultants as expert problem-solvers, or are you simply using them as staff augmentation?

To draw on my experience, I am learning to be a better small-firm consultant. I have developed my skills as a SME and Evangelist over the last decade, but I have not had to be worried about any of the things listed above until the last two years when I started working in a more structured consulting/Professional Services environment.

What has your experience been? Did you start as a SME and become a consultant? Or did you come out of B-school and then develop into a SME?

How has your development as a consultant affected the clients you have worked with and experiences you have had?

As well, I have realized that if I invest some time and effort into this blog, it can be a small revenue source that could get me that much closer to my dream of a MacBook Pro.

The Analysis

In a post yesterday morning, Darren Rowse had some advice on when the best time to release new post is. Using his ideas as the framework, I pulled the data out of my own tracking database and came up with the chart below. This shows the page view data between September 1 2007 and September 15 2008 based on the day of the week vistors came to the site.

Using this data and the general framework that Darren subscribes to, I should be releasing my best and newest thoughts in a week on Monday and Tuesday (GMT).

After Wednesday, I should release only less in-depth articles, with a focus on commentary on news and events. And I must learn to breathe, as I suffer from an ailment all to common in bipolars: a lack of patience.

A new post doesn’t immediately find its target audience unless you have hundreds or thousands (Tens? Ones?) of readers who are influential. If you are luckyin this regard, then these folks will leave useful comments, and through their own attention, help gently show people that a new post is something they should devote their valuable attention towards.

It takes a while for any post to percolate through the intertubes. So patience you must have.

Front-loaded v Long-tailed

Unless, of course, your traffic model is completely different than a popular blogger.

The one issue that I had with Darren’s guidance is that it applies only to blogs that are front-loaded. A front-loaded blog is one that is incredibly popular, or has a devoted, active audience who help push page views toward the most recent 3-5 posts. Once the wave has crested, or the blogger has posted something new, the volume of traffic to older posts falls off exponentially, except in the few cases of profound or controversial topics.

When I analyzed my own traffic, I found that the most of my traffic volume was aimed toward posts from 2005 and 2006. In fact, more recent posts are nowhere near as popular as these older posts. In contrast to the front-loaded blog, mine is long-tailed.

There are a number of influential items in my blog which have proven staying power, which draw people from around the world. They have had deep penetration into search engines, and are relvant to some aspect of peoples’ lives that keeps pulling them back.

Summary

I would highly recommend analyzing your traffic to see it is front-loaded or long-tailed. I know that I wish that this blog  was more front-loaded, with an active community of readers and commentators. However, I am also happy to see that I have created a few sparks of content that keep people returning again and again. If your blog is  long-tailed, then when you post becomes far less relevant than ensuring the freshness and validity of those few popular posts. Ensure that these are maintained and current so that they remain relevant to as many people as possible.

Being the stats nut that I am, I went and pulled the data from my own tracking data, and came up with this.

I made a conscious choice to analyze what year the posts being read were posted in. I wanted to understand when people read my content, which content kept people coming back over and over again. The chart above speaks for itself: through most of the last year it’s clear that the most popular posts were made in 2005.

What is also interesting is the decreasing interest in 2007 posts as 2008 progressed. Posts from 2006 remained steady, as there are a number of posts in that year that amount to my self-help guides to Web compression, mod_gzip, mod_deflate, and Web caching for Web administrators.

This data is no surprise to me, as I posted my rants against Gutter Helmet and their installation process in 2005. Those posts are still near the top of the Google search response for term “Gutter Helmet”. And improving the performance of a Web site is of great interest to many Apache server admins and Web site designers.

What is also clear is that self-hosting my blog and the posting renaissance it has provoked has driven traffic back to my site.

So, what lessons did I learn from this data?

1. Always remember the long tail. Every blogger wants to be relevant, on the edge, and showing that they understand current trends. The people who follow those trends are a small minority of the people who read blogs. Google and other search engines will expose them to your writings in the time of their choosing, and you may find that the three year-old post gets as much traffic as the one posted three hours ago
2. Write often. I was in a blogging funk when my blog was at Wordpress.com. As a geek, I believe that the lack of direct control over the look and feel of my content was the cause of this. In a self-hosted environment, I feel thta I am truly the one in charge, and I can make this blog what I want.
3. Be cautious of your fame. If your posts are front-loaded, i.e. if all your readers read posts from the month and year they are posted in, are you holding people’s long-term attention? What have you contributed to the ongoing needs of those who are outside the technical elite? What will drive them to keep coming to your site in the long run?

So, I post a challenge to other bloggers out there. My numbers are miniscule compared to the blogging elite, but I am curious to get a rough sense of how the long tail is treating you.

It’s your Web site.

Its complex. Abstract. Lots of conflicting ideas and forces are involved. Everyone says they now the best thing for it. Finger-pointing. Door slamming. Screaming.

Am I describing your Web site and the team that supports it? Or your teenager?

If you think of your Web site as a teenager, you begin to realize the problems that your facing. Like a teenager, it has grown physically and mentally, and, as a result, thinks its an experienced adult, ready to take on the world. However, let’s think of your site as a teenager, and think back to how we, as teenagers (yeah, I’m old), saw the world.

MOM! This doesn’t fit anymore!

Your Web site has grown as all of your marketing and customer service programs bear fruit. Traffic is increasing. Revenue is up. Everyone is smiling.

Then you wake up and realize that your Web site is too small for your business. This could mean that the infrastructure is overloaded, the network is tapped out, your connectivity is maxed, and your sysadmins, designers, and network teams are spending most of your day just firefighting.

Now, how can you grow a successful business, or be the hip kid in school, when your clothes don’t fit anymore?

But, you can’t buy an entire wardrobe every six months, so plan, consider your goals and destinations, and shop smart.

DAD! Everyone has one! I need to have one to be cool!

Shiny.

It’s a word that has been around for a long time, and was revived (with new meaning) by Firefly. It means reflective, bright, and new. It’s what attracts people to gold, mirrors, and highly polished vintage cars. In the context of Web sites, it’s the eye-candy that you encounter in your browsing, and go “Our site needs that”.

Now step back and ask yourself what purpose this new eye-candy will serve.

And this is where Web designers and marketing people laugh, because it’s all about being new and improved.

But can you be new and improved, when your site is old and broken?

Get your Web performance in order with what you, then add the stuff that makes your site pop.

But those aren’t the cool kids. I don’t hang with them.

Everyone is attracted to the gleam of the cool new Web sites out there that offer to do the same old thing as your site. The promise of new approaches to old problems, lower cost, and greater efficiencies in our daily lives are what prompt many of us to switch.

As a parent, we may scoff, realizing that maybe the cool kids never amounted to much outside of High School. But, sometimes you have to step back and wonder what makes a cool kid cool.

You have to step back and say, why are they attracting so much attention and we’re seen as the old-guard? What can we learn from the cool kids? Is your way the very best way? And says who?

And once you ask these questions, maybe you agree that some of what the cool kids do is, in fact, cool.

Can I borrow the car?

Trust is a powerful thing to someone, or to a group. Your instinctive response depends on who you are, and what your experiences with others have been like in the past.

Trust is something often found lacking when it comes to a Web site. Not between your organization and your customers, but between the various factions within your organization who are trying to interfere or create or revamp or manage the site.

Not everyone has the same goals. But sometimes asking a few questions of other people and listening to their reasons for doing something will lead to a discussion that will improve the Web site in a way that improves the business in the long run.

Sometimes asking why a teenager wants to borrow the car will help you see things from their perspective for a little while. You may not agree, but at least now it’s not a yes/no answer.

YOU: How was school today? – THEM: Ok.

Within growing organizations, open and clear communication tends to gradually shrivel and degenerate. Communications become more formal, with what is not said being as important as what is. Trying to find out what another department is doing becomes a lot like determining the state of the Soviet Union’s leadership based on who attends parades in Red Square.

Abstract communication is one of the things that separates humans from a large portion of the rest of the animal kingdom. There is nothing more abstract than a Web site, where physical devices and programming code produce an output that can only be seen and heard.

The need for communication is critical in order to understand what is happening in another department. And sometimes that means pushing harder, making the other person or team answer hard questions that they think you’re not interested in, or that you is non of your business.

If you are in the same company, it’s everyone’s business. So push for an answer, because working to create an abstract deliverable that determines the success or failure of the entire firm can’t be based on a grunt and a nod.

Summary

There are no easy answers to Web performance. But if you consider your Web site and your teams as a teenager, you will be able to see that the problems that we all deal with in our daily interactions with teens crop up over an over when dealing with Web design, content, infrastructure, networks and performance.

Managing all the components of a Web site and getting best performance out of it often requires you to have the patience of Job. But it is also good to carry a small pinch of faith in these same teams, faith  that everyone, whether they say it or not, wants to have the best Web site possible.

When you listen to a business report, the stock market indices are an aggregated metric used to represent the performance of a set group of stocks.

When you read about economic indicators, these values are the aggregated representations of complex populations of data, collected from around the country, or the world.

Sport scores are the final tally of an event, but they may not always represent how well each team performed during the match.

The problem with single metrics lies in their simplicity. When a single metric is created, it usually attempts to factor in all of the possible and relevant data to produce an aggregated value that can represent a whole population of results.

These single metrics are then portrayed as a complete representation of this complex calculation. The presentation of this single metric is usually done in such a way that their compelling simplicity is accepted as the truth, rather than as a representation of a truth.

In the area of Web performance, organizations have fallen prey to this need for the compelling single metric. The need to represent a very complex process in terms that can be quickly absorbed and understand by as large a group of people as possible.

The single metrics most commonly found in the Web performance management field are performance (end-to-end response time of the tested business process) and availability (success rate of the tested business process). These numbers are then merged and transformed by data from a number of sources (external measurements, hit counts, conversions, internal server metrics, packet loss), and this information is bubbled up in an organization. By the time senior management and decision-makers receive the Web performance results, that are likely several steps removed from the raw measurement data.

An executive will tell you that information is a blessing, but only when it speeds, rather than hinders, the decision-making process. A Web performance consultant (such as myself) will tell that basing your decisions on a single metric that has been created out of a complex population of data is madness.

So, where does the middle-ground lie between the data wonks and the senior leaders? The rest of this post is dedicated to introducing a few of the metrics that will, in a small subset of metrics, give a senior leaders better information to work from when deciding what to do next.

A great place to start this process is to examine the percentile distribution of measurement results. Percentiles are known to anyone who has children. After a visit to the pediatrician, someone will likely state that “My son/daughter is in the XXth percentile of his/her age group for height/weight/tantrums/etc”. This means that XX% of the population of children that age, as recorded by pediatricians, report values at or below the same value for this same metric.

Percentiles are great for a population of results like Web performance measurement data. Using only a small set of values, anyone can quickly see how many visitors to a site could be experiencing poor performance.

If at the median (50th percentile), the measured business process is 3.0 seconds, this means that 50% of all of the measurements looked at are being completed in 3.0 seconds or less.

If the executive then looks up to the 90th percentile and sees that it’s at 16.0 seconds, it can be quickly determined that something very bad has happened to affect the response times collected for the 40% of the population between these two points. Immediately, everyone knows that for some reason, an unacceptable number of visitors are likely experiencing degraded and unpredictable performance when they visit the site.

A suggestion for enhancing averages with percentiles is to use the 90th percentile value as a trim ceiling for the average. Then side-by-side comparisons of the untrimmed and trimmed averages can be compared. For sites with a larger number of response time outliers, the average will decrease dramatically when it is trimmed, while sites with more consistent measurement results will find their average response time is similar with and without the trimmed data.

It is also critical to examine the application’s response times and success rates throughout defined business cycles. A single response time or success rate value eliminates

• variations by time of day
• variations by day of week
• variations by month
• variations caused by advertising and marketing

An average is just an average. If at peak buiness hours, response times are 5.0 seconds slower than the average, then the average is meaningless, as business is being lost to poor performance which has been lost in the focus on the single metric.

All of these items have also fallen prey to their own curse of the single metric. All of the items discussed above aggregate the response time of the business process into a single metric. The process of purchasing items online is broken down into discrete steps, and different parts of this process likely take longer than others. And one step beyond the discrete steps are the objects and data that appear to the customer during these steps.

It is critical to isolate the performance for each step of the process to find the bottlenecks to performance. Then the components in those steps that cause the greatest response time or success rate degradations must be identified and targeted for performance improvement initiatives. If there are one or two poorly performing steps in a business process, focusing performance improvement efforts on these is critical, otherwise precious resources are being wasted in trying to fix parts of the application that are working well.

In summary, a single metric provides a sense of false confidence, the sense that the application can be counted on to deliver response times and success rates that are nearly the same as those simple, single metrics.

The average provides a middle ground, a line that says that is the approximate mid-point of the measurement population. There are measurements above and below this average, and you have to plan around the peaks and valleys, not the open plains. It is critical never to fall victim to the attractive charms that come with the curse of the single metric.

This position was based on the assumption that the endpoint, in the form of installed applications, wouldcontinue to serve as the focus for user interactions, that these applications would be the points where data was accumulated and processed by users. This could be best described as the firehose: The end-user desktop would be at the end of a flood of data being pushed to it a never-ending flood.

Firefox and Chrome have changed all of that.

The browser has, instead, become the window through which we view and manipulate our data. It’s now ok, completely acceptable in fact, to use online applications as replacements for installed applications, stripping away a profit engine that has fed so many organizations over the years.

The endpoint has been shown to be the access point to our applications, to our data. Data is not brought and stored locally: It is stored remotely and manipulated like a marionette from afar.

While Chrome and Firefox are not perfect, they serve as powerful reminders of what the Web is, and why the browser exists. The Browser is not the end of a flod of incoming data, it is the window through which we see our online world.

While some complain that there is still an endless stream of data, we control and manipulate it. It doesn’t flood us.

Open-Source Browser: Ours or Theirs?

When I read that Google Chrome was an open-source browser, the first thought was: is it theirs or a re-branded Firefox? No one knows at this point, but that will have a direct effect on how the browser performs, and how extensible it will be.

HTTP Standards

Unlike other standards, HTTP standards set out how a browser uses the underlying TCP stack. MSIE6/7 have very broken implementations, and MSIE8 is building on those by increasing the number of connections per host to 6, up from 2 set out in RFC 2616.

Firefox can be configured to mangle this as well, but by default it plays by the standard, adding the option of HTTP pipelining into its mix of persistent HTTP connections.

It will be VERY interesting to see how Google Chrome comes configured out of the box, and how much control users have over the HTTP behaviour of this new browser.

(X)HTML/CSS/JS Standards

This area is a mess. No browser implements this standards in a way that is completely consistent with the written text, and page designers have to use a variety of page testing products (such as BrowserCam) prior to release to ensure that their design is somewhat presentable in all browsers on all platforms.

The rendering of Javascript will be crucial in this new browser, as so much of the new Web is built on applications that are almost completely Javascript-driven.

I am sure that there will be sites that will be completely mangled by the new browser, but, knowing Google, we will be getting a 2.0 release, the 1.0 release being used within Google for a while now to test it under real-world conditions.

Caching

As a few sites in the world do use cache-control headers properly, it will be interesting to see how a browser created by one of the major ad-serving and search providers on the Web tracks page objects. Will it follow explicit/implicit caching rules? Or will it impose a heavy penalty on bandwidth by downloading objects more frequently than other production browsers do?

Proxies, and the Debacle of the Google Web Accelerator

Back in 2005, Google launched a badly designed and gighly flawed product called the Google Web Accelerator. This product proxied Web traffic through the Google network and allowed the company to develop a pattern of user browsing habits and search selections that would allow them to better target their ad products.

I have a great fear that this will be an integrated part of the Google browser project. If it is, it should be a configurable option, not an out-of-the box standard.

I am sure that there will be a few performance conversations that occur around the Google Chrome browser in the weeks ahead. I look forward to hearing what the community has to say about this new addition to the browser wars.