The close relationship between development and ongoing monitoring at CareerSite is reflected in its staffing approach. That technician is backed up by the eight developers and site engineers. It's more typical of dotcoms, where developers play an active role in monitoring ongoing performance. The dotcom approach has come about for two reasons. First, most dotcoms have to run with a fairly lean IT staff.
Technicians typically have to do double-duty as site architects and site managers.
They can then use this input to fine-tune site functions on a more frequent, iterative basis than their enterprise counterparts normally would. Sean Moriarty, executive vice president of technology at TicketmasterOnline- CitySearch in Los Angeles, also makes a clear distinction between infrastructure and content monitoring. But determining whether what they're delivering is what the user needs is another matter. Like Medd, Moriarty uses homegrown tools designed to assess whether or not his sites are delivering the particular type of content they're supposed to. The idea, Moriarty says, is to create test content that the application has to retrieve, just as it would from a real user query.