Development Dimensions International, a human resources management company based in Pittsburgh, provides web-based applications to companies across the world, assisting in employee recruitment, training, development and assessment. Many of its customers have hiring initiatives in far corners of the globe, where candidates face a variety of connectivity challenges from low-bandwidth connections to government-imposed firewalls. 

For Manu Brahmam, DDI's director of management information systems, the challenge was to prove to customers that slow-running applications were not a function of DDI's technology, but of end users' connectivity limitations. Only once the root of the problem was demonstrated, Brahman explained in an interview with FierceCIO, could DDI work with its customers on finding solutions.

FierceCIO: Can you tell me a little bit about DDI's business and what kind of web-based applications you sell?

Manu Brahmam: We are a global HR talent management company. Our revenue mix has shifted dramatically in the last five years from traditional, classroom type methods to technology-based, fast application delivery of our products and services. Our revenue from technology has grown from about 30 percent to 65 percent in that period. 

The kinds of tools we deliver electronically start with what we call selection, which is about getting the right candidate in the first place. We have a series of web-based applications that do testing. The next phase is about how to grow that employee. In that realm we, have a series of tools that are all web applications to identify development areas in an employee. The third phase [occurs when] the employee is ready to step up into a new role. We offer a series of web-based applications that we call our assessment applications, which are targeted job simulation applications.

FCIO: What are the challenges inherent in delivering web-based applications to end users in developing regions?

Brahmam: As we went down the road toward increased technology and increased globalization, one thing that became apparent is that we didn't have the right tools and methods to deliver technologies in some parts of the world. As we started encountering client complaints, saying the system is kind of slow over here, we were left in an incredibly reactive posture. We didn't have tools in place to diagnose and resolve the nature of the concerns. In the summer of last year, we came to the realization that we had to make some investments in those tools and technologies to deal with the problem in a more customer-focused manner. We evaluated a number of technologies for end-user monitoring of web applications, and we selected a combination of two, including Coradiant.

FCIO: Can you offer specifics on how end-user monitoring technology has helped you?

Brahmam: Here's one example: [Two major companies] were doing large-scale testing and selection projects throughout India and the Far East, and these were two environments where we were receiving complaints that our application wasn't working well enough. We immediately started realizing some incredible benefits from the monitoring tool. In both cases, the device allowed us to empirically prove to customers through fact-based data that the sessions that were slow were sessions coming in on network connections with either low bandwidth characteristics or unstable bandwidth characteristics.  

We were able to manage the customer noise down to a mutual agreement that there's nothing that DDI can really do to fix the problem so we need to deal with this as client management/ expectation management issue.  In both cases we took a customer that was very hot and were able to have an intelligent, fact-based conversation about the nature of the problem.

FCIO: How complicated was it to implement this monitoring technology, given that end users access your applications from any variety of locations and network connections around the world?

Brahmam: One of the reasons we selected the Coradiant product is that it is deployed at our data center where the applications are hosted. It analyzes every single web connection that's coming in, and it analyzes trends over time. The beauty of it is that there's a single instance of it at our data center.

It's rare in technology that you are sold something with the promise that it is going to be transparent and easy to implement and you find out that it is, in fact, true. In this case, all those promises were validated.  It was totally seamless to integrate into my infrastructure.

FCIO: What have been some of the more interesting insights you've gained from getting a closer look at the web connections coming in?

Brahmam: The big lesson for us was that the mythical Chinese firewall on Internet censorship is real. It's particularly real on university campuses, where a lot of multinationals recruit from. What we were able to do is develop a slightly different positioning for [our client's] recruiting programs. We were able to work with them to modify their recruiters' positioning. It involved simple things, like [sending candidates] to a testing environment. Our experience is that it's probably better for you not to take the test when you're in a university lab.