EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

UEM for user experience management and RPA for robotic process automation are two IT acronyms that continue to elude well-understood definitions, albeit for somewhat opposite reasons. UEM goes back decades, first emerging out of primarily network-centric management, becoming a cornerstone of business service management, and later being consumed by application performance management (APM) much to its own detriment. RPA is comparatively recent, evolving out of screen scraping into far richer technical options that are diverse in nature, with many RPA vendors contending with and replacing the more consultancy-driven platforms for business process management (BPM).

In the course of researching, documenting and advising on user experience management needs and directions for more than a decade, I’ve found myself waging a quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) war with several industry assumptions. Chief among these is the notion that user experience management (UEM) is purely a subset of application performance management (APM). This APM-centricity misses some of UEM’s most critical value points, and in a basic sense fails to recognize what UEM is truly about.

Digital and user experience management has been the focus of multiple EMA research studies throughout the years, both as a stand-alone topic and as part of EMA’s ongoing examination of critical trends such as digital and operational transformation, IT performance optimization, and of course application performance management (APM).  In many respects, optimizing the digital experience [...]