Who’s Responsible for Sorting Out Failed Transactions?

During our webcast last week on Business Transaction Management, we polled our audience of Architects, Project Managers, IT Executives, Application Developers and Business Managers to see who’s responsible in their organizations for fixing things when transactions start to fail.

We asked them:

When Transactions Fail, Which Group is Responsible for Sorting Things Out?

We got a variety of answers, as you’d expect. Not every organization handles failed transactions the same way. However, by far the most common answer was Application Support Groups. Operations was a distant second, followed closely by Business Units. Here are the results of our poll.

1) Application Support Group - 68%
2) Operations - 13%
3) Business Units - 12%
4) We just muddle thru - 7%

For companies that don’t have Business Transaction Management, it’s typically the Business Units who first hear about the issue—often from irate customers whose transactions did not complete properly. The Business Units then notify Operations and App Support (please note that I’m using the word “notify” here as a very gentle euphemism for the way they actually tell them about the problem). And these unfortunate Application Support and Operations teams are left with the complicated and time-consuming task of sorting out where in their complex application flows the failure took place.

The biggest issue, of course, isn’t necessarily who fixes the issue but how soon they are able to fix it. Unless you’re tracking all the transactions flowing across your distributed applications, you probably won’t hear about failed transactions until they’ve impacted your bottom line.