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Why application slowness doesn't belong in your IT department
In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses rely more than ever on technology to drive efficiency, performance, and innovation. Whether it's customer-facing platforms, internal tools, or enterprise-level applications, you need everything to run smoothly to stay competitive. But there’s one problem that can bring things to a crawl: application slowness.
IT departments usually get called on to fix this. But is it really their job? The truth is that while IT teams are invaluable to the overall infrastructure and technological direction of a company, fixing application slowness may not be the best use of their time or skills. In fact, delegating this challenge to IT departments can slow down your entire organization. External experts like Sciante offer solutions that are faster, more efficient, and more permanent than in-house efforts.
Let’s explore why it’s worth considering outside help when dealing with slow applications.
IT Departments: The Road Builders of Your Organization
Think of your IT team as the people who build and maintain the roads for your business. These roads are the infrastructure: hardware, networks, servers, security, and cloud services. They make sure everything is set up and secure so your business can move smoothly.
Road builders don't worry about the cars driving on these roads. Their focus is on ensuring that the roads are sturdy, well-maintained, and able to handle any future needs, such as an increase in traffic or heavier loads. Similarly, your IT team is primarily concerned with ensuring your technological infrastructure is solid, scalable, and secure. They lay down the necessary paths for the entire organization to run on — and they are very good at it.
But applications? Applications are the cars driving on those roads. They’re the individual tools that allow your team to perform specific tasks, interact with customers, and execute critical business processes. Application performance issues, like slowness, are akin to a car breaking down or driving inefficiently. Fixing a car is not the same skill set as building a road.
When you ask your IT department to tackle application slowness, it’s like asking road builders to fix cars. While they may have some of the necessary knowledge and tools, they are not car mechanics. This leads to a significant mismatch in both expertise and approach.
Why Slow Applications Need Special Skills
Application slowness isn’t usually caused by hardware or infrastructure issues. It can stem from poorly written code, memory leaks, database issues, or network congestion. Figuring out the cause often requires expertise in coding, databases and application structure, which isn’t usually the IT department’s area of expertise.
Your IT team might attempt to diagnose the problem, but without specialized knowledge, they may struggle to pinpoint the exact issue. Worse yet, even if they do identify the problem, fixing it could take an inordinate amount of time and resources.
Some common reasons behind application slowness include:
- Poor coding practices or algorithms that cause delays
- Long or unoptimized database queries
- Memory leaks that drag down performance over time
- Network delays between servers and databases
- Scaling issues from growing data or increased users
Each of these problems needs specific skills to solve, and your IT team may not have the depth of knowledge required to pinpoint and fix these issues permanently.
The Cost of Asking IT to Handle Slow Applications
When IT departments spend time on application issues, they’re not focusing on their main tasks, like maintaining infrastructure and security. Here’s why it’s costly to ask IT to handle application slowness:
- Opportunity Cost: Every hour spent on applications is an hour not spent on improving your technology and security.
- Resource Drain: Slow applications that are not quickly and permanently fixed slow down other departments, delaying people in their main jobs.
- Temporary fixes: Without deep expertise, IT may only be able to provide a short-term solution, not a lasting fix.
Why External Experts Are Better for This Job
Imagine if, instead of asking IT to fix a car, you call a mechanic who works on cars every day. Specialists like Sciante focus on application performance and can quickly find and permanently solve the root cause of slowness.
Here’s why working with a dedicated external partner like Sciante can be game-changing for your organization:
- Speed: Experts can quickly diagnose and fix the issue, saving time.
- Efficiency: They have the right tools and proven processes to tackle the problem.
- Permanent solutions: They can address the root cause, providing a long-lasting fix.
- Scalability and Optimization: External experts can also help you prepare for future growth.
- IT Focus: Letting experts handle slow applications allows IT to concentrate on the job you hired them for.
A Real-World Example
One of our customers had a data warehouse that their IT department believed was performing as well as it could. They had applied every optimization they knew of—adding more CPU, memory, and faster storage. Given their skills and responsibilities, they had done an impressive job, and the performance had noticeably improved.
However, despite these efforts, there were still many issues they couldn't address, like inefficient queries, poorly ordered tasks, and other functional inefficiencies.
When Sciante stepped in to analyze the data warehouse, we identified numerous areas for improvement. In one case, we optimized a query that had previously taken hours to run, reducing its execution time to a fraction of a second—an improvement factor of 24.000000. You read that right!
Optimization is still ongoing, but when we're done, the data warehouse will not only run significantly faster but also cost less than half as much to operate.
Future-Proof Your Business
Application slowness is a specialized problem. By bringing in experts, you get faster, more permanent solutions and keep your IT team focused on building and maintaining the core infrastructure of your business.
Don’t let slow applications drag your business down. Make a - no strings attached - appointment with me and get the experts on board and let your IT team focus on building the road to your company’s future.