With the financial and strategic goals of the organization in question, CEOs and boards are increasingly looking to their CIOs to demonstrate how applications and digital services are driving digital experiences and delivering business value.
Over the decades, IT has gradually moved up the value chain in organizations. And today, technologists, who once delivered systems that enhanced business, now innovate solutions that fundamentally enable it. As a result, they have earned their rightful spot at the decision-making table. And with this, CIOs across industries must now work to ensure that IT is supporting the needs of the organization, delivering transformation, improving productivity and efficiency, and driving revenue growth.
“Traditional KPIs for IT systems may be relevant to technologists, but beyond the IT department, it is the impact of these metrics on business outcomes that is the only concern.”
Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor, Cisco Observability
The effectiveness of their efforts varies, however. Indeed, many have been able to implement governance models which ensure that IT is a constant thread which runs through every corner of the business. Many more, however, have struggled to make the progress they would like, held back by a huge number of cultural, structural and technical problems.
Such shortcomings which previously slowed an organization’s growth, can outright impede it today, as companies simply cannot remain competitive unless they have total IT-business alignment. In today’s marketplace, they’re pandering to increasingly demanding customers who want everything, instantly at their fingertips. Digital experience is everything and if your business can’t deliver it, customers will vote with their feet.
With the financial and strategic goals of the organization in question, CEOs and boards are increasingly looking to their CIOs to demonstrate how applications and digital services are driving digital experiences and delivering business value.
Traditional KPIs for IT systems may be relevant to technologists, but beyond the IT department, it is the impact of these metrics on business outcomes that is the only concern. CIOs are therefore urgently looking to bring IT closer to the business, and for ways to accurately and consistently measure and report on the business impact of digital experience. The efforts of the majority are however undermined by the tools they currently use.
Digital experience, a C-Suite concern
Having become accustomed to the commodities that an increasingly rich landscape of digital services makes possible, consumers have begun to actively shun brands that fail to meet their expectations. Business leaders have picked up on this, and recent research conducted by Cisco found that digital experience has become a significantly more critical issue for 75% of C-level executives over the last three years.
Business leaders are looking for insight into application performance to spot trends and identify where applications are creating strong business value so that they fully exploit these areas. At the same time, they want to identify potential issues and vulnerabilities which pose a significant threat to digital experience, in order to mitigate risk and avoid a revenue-impacting incident. Such analysis has yielded impressive results for organizations that get it right — the slick, hyper-personalized digital workflows that many leading retailers now offer is proof of that.
Seamless digital experiences are an uphill battle for IT teams
The expectations business leaders now have for their CIOs and teams are clear — they need to deliver ever more intuitive and compelling digital experiences that deliver positive, tangible business outcomes, whilst knowing that even the smallest slip-up in application performance could have profound consequences for their organizations.
These challenges are made infinitely more difficult by the crippling levels of complexity that now exist within IT departments. Technologists are struggling to manage an increasingly sprawling and volatile IT estate, with limited visibility into cloud native technologies. Because many still rely on multiple, siloed monitoring tools across their applications and underlying infrastructure, they have no clear line of sight into applications running across hybrid environments. This makes it extremely challenging to detect issues, understand root causes and apply fixes before digital experience is affected. With this, the potential for disruption to digital services grows significantly.
Equally worrisome, this complexity leaves CIOs with no means of effectively aligning IT to the business. They can’t contextualize their application data with business metrics, which means they’re unable to demonstrate how digital experience (whether good or bad) is impacting business outcomes — which is exactly what C-level executives are demanding to know.
Full-stack observability: an imperative for IT-business alignment
Full-stack observability is the answer to the aforementioned woes. With it, technologists can get real-time insights into IT availability, performance, and security up and down the IT stack, from customer-facing applications right through to core infrastructure, across both cloud-native and on premises environments. This means they can detect, understand and resolve issues in an effective and timely way to maintain seamless digital experiences.
Moreover, full-stack observability allows technologists to correlate IT performance data with real-time business metrics. In doing so, CIOs can track, measure and report on the impact that application performance and digital experience is having on the business. They can provide business leaders with a comprehensive set of metrics and insights related to experience — from number of unique sessions, 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).
Full-stack observability provides a platform for IT to become completely aligned with wider business strategy, establishing a common language between IT and business stakeholders. And this is game-changing at a time when commercial success is now defined by an organization’s ability to deliver world-class digital experiences.
