Across all sectors, business leaders are recognizing the importance of digital experience, and the need for applications to be available, secure and operating at peak performance at all times. In fact, in recent research conducted by Cisco, 75% of C-level executives reported that digital experience has become a significantly more critical issue for them over the last three years.
The reasons for this shift are obvious. Consumer expectations around digital experience are soaring all over the world. People are actively seeking out the best, most innovative applications and digital services, and they’re walking away en masse from brands who fail to deliver intuitive, seamless and secure experiences.
Business leaders know that digital experience is now the number one battleground for customer acquisition, employee engagement and retention, and for revenue growth. Commercial success is increasingly hinging on an organization’s ability to deliver exceptional digital experiences.
Little wonder then that digital experience has been thrust to the front of the boardroom agenda. The research reveals that the performance of business-critical applications and digital services, and their impact on the business, is now reported to C-level executives on a consistent basis in 80% of global organizations. Senior leaders are demanding full visibility into application performance and, crucially, insight into how applications and digital services are delivering value for their organizations.
This heightened scrutiny of digital experience and application performance presents a major opportunity for technologists to demonstrate their skills and value. They can position themselves as strategic operators within their organizations, with their work at the very center of innovation, customer and employee engagement and revenue generation.
However, in order to take advantage of this career-defining opportunity, technologists need the right tools and insights to manage IT availability and performance, mitigate risk, and to ensure that applications are delivering maximum business value.
Business leaders now want greater visibility and insight into application performance and business impact
Without doubt, there has been a major trend towards C-level executives looking to understand and analyze in granular detail the experience that customers are encountering when engaging with their brand through digital channels. This simply wasn’t the case a few years ago.
For example, we’re seeing leaders of retail organizations wanting to scrutinize application performance at every phase of the customer journey, from sign-up and log-in, through to search and check-out. They want to track the entire workflow and then evaluate the speed and efficiency of each of the underlying pieces within it.
Meanwhile, C-level executives in banks and financial services institutions are focussing heavily on digital experience monitoring in their efforts to match and overtake the innovative, personalized experiences being offered by emerging competitors. And in manufacturing, business leaders are looking to drive operational efficiencies by scrutinizing the performance of each and every process across their vast SAP landscapes.
Most importantly, the real shift is in how business leaders are now wanting to directly measure the impact that applications are having on the business. So, on the one hand, they want to understand how innovation is creating new business value – through increased customer acquisition and revenue, for example. While on the other hand, they want to identify the potential risks posed by application performance and security issues. They want to direct their resources and investments in the right areas to ensure that poor digital experiences don’t lead to a loss of customers, revenue and reputation.
Technologists being held back from operating strategically by a lack of visibility and insight
Unsurprisingly, technologists are feeling the pressure as a result of this added scrutiny from senior leaders in their organizations. There is now a realization that they need to operate in a more strategic, business-focussed manner. This means engaging in business-level conversations with senior leaders, leaving behind technical detail and instead focussing on core business metrics. And for some technologists, this means going beyond their comfort zone.
Encouragingly, across many organizations, I’m seeing technologists that are stepping up to the challenge and pivoting to meet the evolving needs of their organizations. As during the pandemic, technologists are displaying incredible skills, commitment and adaptability to drive their businesses forward – and, of course, to take advantage of the opportunities which will undoubtedly present themselves as digital experience becomes a mission-critical priority for their leaders.
Unfortunately, however, the reality is that most technologists currently don’t have the tools and insights they need to operate at a more strategic level. They don’t have the right level of visibility into applications and underlying infrastructure (particularly within cloud native environments) and this is making it almost impossible to effectively manage and optimize IT availability, performance and security. They’re struggling to detect issues, and even when they do, they can’t understand root causes and dependencies in order to fix issues before they affect digital experience. And as a result, the likelihood of a revenue and reputation-impacting incident hitting their organizations is rising significantly.
What’s more, very few technologists are able to link IT performance data to business outcomes. They have no way of tracking how experience is impacting key business metrics around engagement, conversions and revenue. And without this level of insight, they simply can’t engage in the types of conversations that C-level executives are looking for. They can’t operate at a strategic level.
CTO Advisor
Cisco Observability
Full-stack observability is vital for technologists to deliver business impact and demonstrate their value
With 98% of business leaders predicting that demand from C-level executives for visibility and reporting into digital experience will increase over the next two years, all technologists need to act now to address this worsening problem.
And this is where full-stack observability comes in. It provides IT teams with full and unified visibility across their entire IT estate, at the application level, into the supporting digital services (such as microservices or Kubernetes), and into the underlying infrastructure-as-code (IaC) services (such as compute, server, database and network) they leverage from their cloud providers. It allows technologists to cut through complexity and high volumes of data to locate, understand and resolve availability, performance and security issues across their application landscapes.
Full-stack observability correlates application data with real-time business metrics, so that IT teams can identify and prioritize issues and threats based on potential impact to end user experience. And crucially, by providing a business lens on application performance data, full-stack observability allows technologists to measure the impact of application performance on the business. They can report to C-level executives on an expanding set of business metrics, from average revenue per session and average revenue per transaction, through to ‘revenue at risk’ from potential outages, and overall user experience (based on defined workflows).
With the insights provided by full-stack observability, technologists can leave behind the constant firefighting and take a more proactive approach to managing application performance. And they can engage with senior leaders at a far more strategic level, demonstrating their unrivaled understanding of the business and showcasing how their work is driving positive business outcomes.
