Johannesburg, 23 Nov 2020
In the modern, digital organisation, monitoring, collaboration and automation are three essential elements required to create an agile and flexible business. Monitoring, however, remains the key to ensuring that all aspects of a business are operating as designed.
While managers, in the past, could ensure the efficient operation of their company by personally monitoring all aspects of the operations, the modern organisation is a complex beast with so many individual elements that this is simply no longer possible.
Kenneth Dolbey, New Business Development at Sourcing SA, explains that in order to properly manage the modern, digital company, it’s critical that both technology and culture are part of the discussion. “You can’t simply throw technology at a problem, implementing systems and processes without ensuring that your company culture evolves at the same time.
“Today, we see that the decision around which technology to use is driven by the business, but the IT team still needs to implement, integrate and manage it. However, ensuring that any new technology delivers against its initial promise requires that all stakeholders take responsibility.”
This requires a fundamental change in the culture of many organisations. He explains that in the past, monitoring was perceived as a way to see when something had gone wrong, but today, monitoring systems are the source of critical data for the business.
“There’s a lot of talk about creating data-driven organisations, but people need to integrate being data-driven into their culture, creating an environment where the first question asked before any business decision is made is: ‘Where is the data to justify this decision?’”
Creating a culture based on monitoring has been critical to the success of TymeBank.
In a market dominated by large financial services organisations, it has managed to build up a strong and loyal customer base by embracing technology, automating sign-up processes and driving exceptional customer experience. The customers are all digitally based as the bank has no branches.
Bruce Paveley, Head of Innovation, Data and Infrastructure at TymeBank, comments that leveraging the data from the bank’s monitoring systems is critical to ensuring it can maintain a competitive edge. “This capability assists us in measuring infrastructure and system availability along with user experience of our apps.
“As we’re almost totally cloud-based, it’s not just about infrastructure availability, but whether or not a customer can actually transact.”
Application system instrumentation enables the bank to be error-driven and data-driven, from a monitoring point of view. Infrastructure monitoring assists with capacity management, which is an SARB requirement. “However, our key focus is on ensuring that bank clients can transact 7x24x365 from any digital platform.
“Part of running a digital business is to make monitoring a way of life, as you never get a second chance to make a first impression.”
Dolbey adds that understanding the business impact of specific events gives companies the ability to focus their actions on the areas where it will have the greatest business impact.
“This is how monitoring ties into business strategy. If a company’s key focus is customer satisfaction, then understanding the impact of individual processes on this outcome is of critical importance,” he says. “But if everyone in the company has insight into the strategy as well as an understanding of the data created by the monitoring solution then you start to see them connecting the work they do on a daily basis to the overall performance of the company.”
“If everyone, from the CEO to a contact centre agent, knows what the impact of a specific system being down is, then they can take the initiative and compensate for this. If there’s limited impact on the business, then they have the knowledge that the issue can be resolved without pulling resources away from more important activities.”
While companies are rapidly embracing new technologies, the ability to monitor the impact of these is critical to future business success and efficiency. Equally important is building a company culture that embraces the value of data and its importance.
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