Customers, employees, partners and suppliers alike expect applications and digital services to be fast, reliable and always-on, no matter what device they are on or where they are located.
As digital channels and services become more and more vital to business growth, enterprises must embrace unified Digital Experience Management (DEM). The only way for companies to be able to distinguish themselves in today's digital world is to do this effectively.
Companies need to ask themselves the questions:
* Are you using the proper tools within each environment to deliver a seamless and solid end-user experience?
* Do you have insight into each and every step, infrastructure and network component to prevent and or fix performance issues?
* And can you manage and optimise IT systems and processes quickly and easily to improve the digital experience?
ITWeb Events spoke to Mark Robinson, director, solution engineering, Riverbed Technology, who will be speaking at the event.
ITWeb Events: What are the four main roles that manage the digital experience in an enterprise?
Robinson: The IT executive is responsible for ensuring that IT supports the business goals including revenue, customer satisfaction, workforce productivity as well as the success of digital transformation initiatives.
The architect is responsible for designing and optimising the architecture of the network, infrastructure and data centre. The aim is to optimise capacity, minimise cost and ensure high-quality and reliable user experiences.
The application developer is responsible for developing, delivering, supporting and optimising business-critical apps.
And lastly, IT operations and network operations are responsible for providing end-to-end service management and problem resolution for apps and the network and infrastructure over which they run.
ITWeb Events: Why is it so important that organisations are aware of the impact of their digital strategy/experience?
Robinson: DEM has evolved from traditional monitoring and network/application performance management to become a catalyst for business and IT alignment. However, despite the growing importance of DEM, companies rely on cobbled together point solutions that force IT teams into silos and take their sights away from what should be their unifying goal: to deliver the best digital experiences.
Through successful implementation of DEM, companies will experience a number of benefits including: rapid development and deployment of applications and digital services; faster problem resolution; delivery of better digital services to all end-users and the ability to assess the impact of their digital performance.
ITWeb Events: What are the challenges associated with digital experience?
Robinson: Digital transformation changes the way businesses engage and interact with the end-user. It also alters how the business itself must operate and how it sets goals for and utilises IT to help achieve competitive differentiation. In order to achieve success, businesses must address various challenges.
Typically an application life cycle consists of six stages: assess, design, develop, test, deploy and manage and often IT organisations implement digital experience practices within these stages with different timelines, teams, tools and approaches. This potentially creates problems throughout the life cycle.
Without unifying insight and performance analytics, companies may have difficulty understanding current performance levels for end-users, applications, networks and infrastructure.
Another common challenge associated with the digital experience is ineffective tools and instrumentation. Nearly 78% of all organisations are experiencing some inconsistency with their digital experience quality, which can have serious impacts on the business.
At the heart of every digital experience is an app, which is a complex chain of interactions including many moving parts. Should any of these parts suffer issues or failure, the quality of the digital experience will suffer.
It is imperative that organisations work towards a holistic management system to ensure that the digital experience of the end-user is a good one.
ITWeb Events: What is the solution to the above-mentioned challenges?
Robinson: A single, unified digital experience management solution that provides end-to-end monitoring and proactive performance insights allows companies to innovate more quickly with fewer problems along the development and application delivery lifecycle.
An effective DEM solution should:
* Capture all types of data and transactions;
* Provide deep insights into application and network performance;
* Enable proactive problem detection and resolution;
* Measure all the steps; and
* Provide performance diagnostics and deliver common, high-definition data sets.
In conclusion, for any digital transformation initiative to be successful, it must also be successfully managed. By doing so, businesses can accelerate their digital initiatives, ensure quality end-user experiences and optimise business outcomes.
