Section 4.1. A New Standard of Customer Care

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4.1 A New Standard of Customer Care

In many ways, Oracle performance analysis is still in its infancy. The age of response time-based optimization methods ”ushered in by the likes of Juan Loaiza, Roderick Ma ±alac, Anjo Kolk, and Shari Yamaguchi ”is certainly a big technical leap forward. But technical advances represent only a part of our field's necessary growth path . The standard of quality with which we treat our customers (our users, our managers, our consulting clients ...) is another tremendous growth opportunity for us.

The Stanford University Human Subjects Manual illustrates how I believe we ought to treat our customers. The following text is an excerpt from the chapter entitled "Informed Consent " [Stanford (2001)]:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should:

• Have the legal capacity to give consent;

• Be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other form of constraint or coercion; and

• Have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the subject matter and the elements involved as to enable him or her to make an informed and enlightened decision.

This latter element requires that all of the following be made known to the subject:

1. The nature of the experiment;

2. The duration of the experiment;

3. The purpose of the experiment;

4. The method and means by which the experiment is to be conducted ;

5. All inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected;

6. The effects upon the subject's health or person which may possibly come from his or her participation in the experiment.

I find the idea of informed consent extremely relevant to our profession. Thankfully, few Oracle analysts live under the kinds of literally life-and-death pressures that medical practitioners deal with every day. But, regularly, many of us are enlisted to execute very technical tasks that few non-specialists understand, in situations that involve very high stakes for the customers who need our help. The doctrine of informed consent is a sort of "bill of rights" that protects any customer who lives on the short end of the teeter -totter in a technology balance of power.

But living up to the standard of informed consent is virtually impossible for practitioners who use the conventional Method C Oracle tuning approach. The Method C technology simply doesn't provide you with the information you need to predict how a project ”or even a small piece of a project ”is going to turn out. You can't tell your customers something you don't know. One of the most important benefits of Method R is that it puts within reach the technical tools that enable us to enact this informed consent standard of customer care within our profession.

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