Don’t let digital experience get in the way of your business strategy

Do you remember the last time you expressed your sincere admiration for a digital device? In fact, I felt the power of digital devices last month. I was on a business trip when I received an email from the credit card company to verify my recent purchase. I was smart and immediately found that it was a fraudulent transaction, and the amount was huge. I was actually very satisfied with the credit card company's initiative to send an email to verify the situation, but what was truly unforgettable was the digital experience in the process of handling the incident.

Since I was on a business trip, I needed to use my frozen credit card. The customer service staff told me that I could download their mobile app. Through this app, I can reactivate the credit card and use it for shopping, and then refreeze the credit card immediately after the transaction. In addition, I can see the authorization certificate of the new credit card. This feature can update the credit card information for all services that have been bound to the account in a timely manner. Most importantly, with a simple and convenient digital experience, users can meet all their needs in just a few minutes. So now I am a loyal user of this company.

Like more than two-thirds of businesses worldwide today, credit card companies are developing new, innovative digital services to attract and retain customers. They are deploying digital experience management (DEM) solutions to transform the way they do business, reduce the divide between IT and the business, and improve overall performance.

[[209472]]

Digital Experience Management: More Than Performance Monitoring

I believe everyone has heard of application performance management (APM) and end-user experience monitoring (EUEM). They involve monitoring some indicators, such as the ability to manage the quality of digital services and response time.

The limitations of single APM and EUEM are also becoming increasingly apparent. This is especially true for companies that rely on digital initiatives to drive their business. Why? In fact, if you want to grasp the performance and return on investment of digital services, it is essential to actively manage applications in an overall and comprehensive manner, from development to delivery to consumption. This means that developers must always consider performance when designing applications.

Instantly resolve issues and continuously optimize end-user experience.

Enterprise Management Alliance (EMA), an information technology and data management research, analysis and consulting firm, has a very accurate summary of digital experience management: the analysis and optimization of application service delivery to end users and consumers to promote business results, improve service performance and improve application design.

The multi-layered nature of digital experience management

The implementation of DEM is a difficult task for a number of reasons, the main one being that it is highly multifaceted both technically and organizationally.

Take that powerful credit card mobile app I mentioned earlier. What if it doesn’t perform well? What if users can’t download it? What if the page never loads? What if the link doesn’t work?

From a technical perspective, the application's components span different environments, require different databases and third-party services, and perhaps involve several legacy systems. Consider the countless potential points of failure in just delivering an application to an end user. Credit card companies use hundreds, if not thousands, of digital services to serve consumers, employees, partners, and suppliers every second of every day.

Organizationally, DEM is difficult to implement, primarily because most IT departments are siloed and lack alignment with the business units. A closer look at the structure of most IT companies shows that work groups are set up based on technology areas. One group is responsible for the network, one for applications, one for infrastructure, another for end-user services, and so on. Each group has its own set of solutions to manage its area of ​​responsibility.

The problem with this model is that it is highly fragmented and lacks unified management of the entire digital experience. Solutions from various groups do not work together and data is not coherent. Each group is struggling to solve problems from a performance perspective or determine which areas need improvement.

Although 59% of enterprises believe that digital experience management is a problem faced by both IT and business departments. However, the working groups of these two departments usually have different tasks. Business departments and application developers need to release new digital services and functions quickly and continuously to meet the needs of end users and enterprises. On the other hand, network, infrastructure and end-user support teams have to work hard to ensure stable operations. Bringing changes may disrupt existing services or affect service quality. Once problems occur, they are the first victims.

Three cornerstones of digital experience services

If you agree with EMA’s definition, then DEM should analyze and optimize digital services to support application design, service performance and drive better business outcomes.

Application Design

Companies that focus on digital business are facing pressure to launch new applications and digital services. Therefore, many companies have adopted DevOps to shorten the time it takes for applications to enter the market. Although this sounds like a good choice for companies, accelerating the release of applications is actually accompanied by a series of performance problems. 45% of companies said that as the interval between application releases shortens, service levels are deteriorating.

At a minimum, DEM solutions should be able to provide predictive analysis and diagnostics to help DepOps teams find and fix vulnerabilities early in the development cycle. Data shows that the cost of fixing vulnerabilities in the design phase is 15 times and 100 times less than that in the testing and production phases. This feature is critical because it not only ensures that applications have more powerful performance when released, but also helps companies save a lot of costs.

More proactive DEM solutions can also analyze user satisfaction and acceptance, allowing DevOps teams to better develop development roadmaps and application upgrade directions, while also more accurately measuring the impact of applications on business performance.

Service performance

Performance starts and ends with visualization. You can’t measure, manage, or improve what you can’t see or understand. As third-party cloud services become more popular, more and more applications have been transferred to cloud systems, released and managed through cloud systems, or born in cloud systems. There is no doubt that visualization issues have become more challenging.

Any successful DEM strategy must include an integrated solution for monitoring and managing the cloud. It must also provide key evidence for efficient digital experience management: correlation of performance data between applications, networks, infrastructure (inside and outside the cloud system), and end-user devices. Information technology teams also refer to this high-fidelity data in their work, allowing them to solve problems more quickly.

A more comprehensive DEM strategy includes using technologies such as SD-WAN and WAN optimization to virtualize or software-define network service functions and improve service performance. These technologies can help accelerate applications, enable intelligent network routing, and centrally enforce business regulations, security policies, and performance service-level agreements.

Business Results

For most businesses, digital value creation takes the form of new market opportunities, loyal customers, simplified operations, and increased employee productivity. As a practice or set of technology solutions, digital experience management does not directly create this business value, but rather enables, measures, improves, and protects it.

In a 2017 EMA survey, the top two scenarios for using DEMs were business impact (71%) and business performance (76%), followed by change management, application design, end-user productivity, and service usage. An effective DEM should ideally address all of these scenarios, providing both technical and business metrics to help organizations understand the economic impact of their digital investments.

Summarize

Digital performance affects not only business health, but everything from brand reputation to stock market performance to customer loyalty. According to Amazon, for every second slower a page loads, the company loses $1.6 billion in annual revenue. For a typical stock exchange, if a trading system is 5 milliseconds slower than a competitor’s, the company loses $4 million for every millisecond.

The CEO of my credit card company once said, "Digitalization defines our identity and determines the way we do business." They were the first to realize that digital banking was important for future development and required a completely different technology architecture, a different delivery platform and a different way to achieve business success. This was the beginning of digital operations. Since then, they have taken a flexible approach, moved their infrastructure to public cloud systems, and conducted more than 80,000 big data experiments each year, which has enabled them to stand out from the competition and stay ahead of their competitors.

Don’t rely on serendipity to achieve digital business success. Proactively adopt digital experience management to understand and optimize application planning, design, delivery, and consumption. They determine the future of your company.

If you want to learn more about digital experience management (DEM) solutions, you can scan the QR code below to follow Riverbed on WeChat to get more content.