The Path to Digital Transformation Success

Featured article by Vinod Mohan, Senior Product Marketing Manager for eG Innovations

Digital transformation (DX) is a popular trend that organizations across the globe are bringing into their businesses. Enterprises that are focused on modernizing their channels of engagement, expanding customer outreach, and growing conversion and business revenues are increasingly adopting digital transformation. While it remains an attractive trend that many would like to embrace, real success depends on how effectively and efficiently an organization deals with new technology adoption and performance management.

In this interview, Vinod Mohan, Senior Product Marketing Manager at eG Innovations, provides insight on the various challenges organizations face during digital transformation, shares some best practices for realizing tangible results, and recommends tools and technologies that can support, enable and accelerate digital transformation.

Q) What, in your opinion, is digital transformation?

Let’s first understand what digital transformation is not before looking at what it is. There are popular misconceptions in the industry about digital transformation. People first think of DX as onboarding a new technology, such as BYOD, AI, IoT, and so on. But, these are really just a few options for enhancing an organization’s digital initiatives, and cannot be seen as digital transformation itself.

In reality, digital transformation is the practice or discipline of business transformation that introduces new policies, processes, strategies, skills, tools, and technologies to digitalize systems and modes of doing business. It touches many teams and functions in an organization: engineering, DevOps, IT ops, line-of-business owners, and more. Every team must do its part to enable digital transformation together.

Digital transformation can be understood differently by different companies, based on their requirements and expected goals. For example, an organization seeking to increase conversion could expand their online marketing activities by building a web or mobile application. Another example could be the implementation of digital workplaces – through VDI – that reduces employee dependence on physical workstations, and enables anytime, anywhere connectivity and productivity. Rollout of new online services for customers is another example of digital transformation.

Q) How do you think digital transformation is influencing today’s businesses? Are there any challenges on the path of digital adoption?

Digital transformation influences enterprises to shift the focus to customer experience. The digital experience of end-users becomes sacrosanct in the digital economy. All stakeholders, including application managers, developers, DevOps, and IT teams, are challenged to build, manage and deliver applications that provide customers with a fast, seamless, and rich user experience. IT teams in particular, are charged with delivering services and infrastructure support to meet the high standards for user experience on all digital platforms and endpoints.

New technology frameworks, such as containers, microservices, cloud, and software-defined infrastructures, make performance management and data analytics more challenging for IT operations teams (IT ops). When silos of operations are broken down and infrastructures work more interdependently, contextual visibility of application and infrastructure performance becomes absolutely essential to remediate problems. IT ops need to be equipped with the right skills and the right performance monitoring tools to address the demands of digital transformation.

Q) From your experience, do you recommend any best practices to ensure performance monitoring success in the digital business?

Absolutely. The element of paramount importance is digital experience of end users as they interact with web/mobile applications from different digital touchpoints. Organizations need to track every single customer journey to understand user experience and measure user satisfaction. And, this needs to happen in real time. Application owners and IT ops need to know when and where users are impacted, and get the right analytics to isolate the area of slowness: Is website page load slow due to client-side slowdown in the browser, server-side processing, network connectivity, or content download? This level of real-time digital experience monitoring is necessary to triage issues quickly. Complementing this is synthetic transaction monitoring, where simulated user transactions are tested and their performance is measured 24×7 from different locations. This allows admins to be proactive, rather than reactive, and catch issues before they impact the end users.

Application managers need visibility into all aspects of the business service. This can be achieved by tracing business transactions on web/mobile applications across the application architecture (front end, middleware, backend, and third-party calls) and finding out which server-side tier is experiencing slowness. From a survey conducted by DZone on performance and monitoring, it was found that application code (43 percent) remains the area of the technology stack that tends to have the highest frequency of performance issues. Application managers need to get code-level visibility of the applications (Java, .NET, etc.) to identify bad code and errors.

With the changing technology landscape, effected by digital transformation, IT ops must ensure that the infrastructure delivers maximum performance. If an application is slow and it is not due to a code-level issue, there could be a problem in the supporting infrastructure (network, server, storage, database, virtualization, cloud, etc.). To address this, IT ops needs converged visibility throughout application performance and infrastructure health. This allows them to pinpoint the root cause of application slowdowns for quick troubleshooting and service restoration. And, as they look for tools to get this unified visibility, one thing is keep in mind is automation – the more the tool is automated to perform monitoring and root cause diagnosis, the easier it will be for the IT personnel.

Q) How does data analytics fit in the world of digital transformation?

Data analytics is an integral part of digital transformation. With new application and infrastructure components, new datasets, KPIs, and SLAs in play, digital transformation breaks the status quo and poses new questions to answer and new insights to be uncovered to make decision-making meaningful and action-oriented. There are tools available that include cognitive/AI capabilities to make sense of data. But, the important thing to keep in mind is understanding how all the moving parts in the digital ecosystem work together collectively – every server, every application, across every tier. Organizations need correlative intelligence and anomaly detection capabilities, as part of analytics, to speed up troubleshooting. Machine learning also offers value to IT teams as it helps scan historical workloads, bottlenecks and performance variations, and find pattern similarities to identify recurring issues.

From the perspective of IT ops, predictive capabilities can be used to forecast infrastructure capacity usage. This enables administrators to make capacity planning more efficient and data-driven, and also future-proof their infrastructures through right-sizing and optimizing, resulting in quantifiable cost savings.

Q) What are your parting thoughts for enterprises embarking on their digital transformation journey? Is the industry, in general, ready for it?

If you are going through digital transformation in your organization, you are not alone. It is part of the technology evolution in the industry and everyone will have to embrace it at some point or another. As part of your organization’s digital transformation initiative, you may need to undergo substantial changes in technology adoption, process implementation and competency development. And, many priorities, strategies and budgets will need to be revised and readjusted to get the best benefits of digital transformation. When done right, digital transformation has a great positive influence on business growth, brand, customer satisfaction, organizational productivity and ROI.

Vinod Mohan is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for eG Innovations, a global provider of unified performance monitoring and root-cause diagnosis solutions for virtual, physical and cloud IT infrastructures. He has 10 years of experience in product, technology and solution marketing of IT software and services spanning application performance management, network, systems, virtualization, storage, IT security and IT service management (ITSM).

Previously, he was a Senior Product Marketing Manager at SolarWinds for server and application monitoring software. Now a key team member for eG Innovations, he is a contributing author for the eG Innovations blog, “Application & Virtualization Performance Insights“, along with other trade publications including APMdigest, DABCC, Cyber Defense Magazine, IT Briefcase, Insfosec Island, The Hacker News, IT Pro Portal, and SolarWinds THWACK community.