INTELLIGENT CLOUD
Ultimately, in a
digitally driven
society, it is
fast becoming
clear that a
siloed approach
to Digital
Experience
Management is
outdated.
to the management and implementation,
of digital experiences is required. So,
where do you begin?
Technologically, modern applications
traverse multiple environments, call on
multiple databases and third-party services,
and probably link to several legacy systems.
This means that in any digital experience,
there lies the risk of multiple points of
failure — even in delivering just one
application to one end user.
When you multiply that by hundreds,
maybe thousands of digital services that
each digitally-driven organisation uses
to serve their customers, employees,
partners, and suppliers every second
of every day — the size of the challenge
rapidly becomes more evident.
Organisationally, Digital Experience
Management is difficult because of
the siloed nature of most enterprise
organisations. More often than not, there
is a lack of alignment and communications
between IT and lines of business.
For example, if you look at most IT
organisations within the enterprise,
teams are organised by technology
domains. There is a team responsible for
the network, another team responsible
for applications, one for infrastructure,
another for end user services, and so
on. Each team operates their own set of
solutions to help them manage just their
domain. None of these teams are aligned
34
to the lines of business, or even the overall
business objectives.
This means that organisations will
have to find a way to implement tools
and working groups, that can provide
them with one view of the entire digital
experience. This might seem like a huge
task, but it does not have to be if you start
with the basics.
Change is complex and rarely easy, but
there are three areas to consider for a great
Digital Experience Management strategy
that can help any organisation.
First and foremost, application design is
fundamental to success.
After all, digitally-focused companies
are constantly under pressure to launch
new applications and digital services.
It is also why so many companies are
implementing DevOps practices to speed
up time-to-market. In theory, this is great
for business, but it can also compound
performance issues. Digital Experience
Management solutions should provide
predictive analytics and diagnostics to help
DevOps teams identify and troubleshoot
bugs early in the development cycle.
This is important as fixing bugs
during design can be as much as 15 times
cheaper than fixing them in testing and
100x cheaper than addressing them
in production. Ensuring your Digital
Experience Management provides
predictive analytics is also critical when it
comes to user satisfaction and adoption
as it will help the DevOps teams to better
prioritise their development roadmap and
improvement efforts, as well as measure
the business impact of their applications.
Secondly, you also have to ensure that
service performance is up to scratch.
And let us face it: performance starts
and ends with visibility. You simply
cannot measure, manage, or improve
what you cannot see or understand.
This is especially relevant in businesses
where the adoption of third-party cloud
services and more applications moving to,
through, or born in the cloud — as they
require increased visibility into all these
areas to ensure performance. Therefore
any successful Digital Experience
Management strategy must include an
integrated solution for monitoring and
managing the cloud.
Finally, the entire organisation including
IT and lines of business, need to be
focused on business outcomes.
For most organisations, digital value
creation takes the form of new market
opportunities. It builds customer loyalty,
streamlines business operations, and
increases employee productivity. Digital
Experience Management, as a practice
or as a set of technology solutions, does
not create this business value. Rather, it
enables, measures, improves, and protects
it, and therefore it requires the whole
business to work together to achieve
singular goals.
Any successful
Digital Experience
Management
strategy must
include an
integrated
solution for
monitoring and
managing the
cloud.
This may well mean that some
restructuring or at the very least
refocusing of both IT and business
resources are required to bring on the
desired digital experiences.
The bottom line is the entire
organisations needs to start to understand,
and embrace Digital Experience
Management — each playing a role in
optimising application planning, design,
delivery and consumption. It is only when
everyone works together that the future of
the business will be secure.
Issue 11
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS