A Five-Star End-User Experience Requires Unified Digital Experience Management

Introduction

To deliver a five-star digital experience, organizations leverage a variety of systems, methods, and tools across development/test, deployment, and production environments. As digital channels and services become increasingly important for business growth, enterprises must adopt unified digital experience management (DEM).

We live in a digital world where end users (customers, employees, partners or suppliers) expect applications and digital services to be fast, reliable and always available (regardless of device or location). To deliver a five-star experience, organizations leverage a variety of systems, methods and tools in development/test, deployment and production environments.

What differentiates companies, however, is how effectively they do this. Does your company use the right tools in every environment to deliver a seamless and stable end-user experience? Does your company have the insights into every step, every infrastructure or network component, to prevent or correct performance issues? Can your company quickly and easily manage and optimize IT systems and processes to improve digital experiences?

This white paper focuses on the following topics:

• Drivers of digital change
• Digital Experience Challenges
• Components of a valid DEM
• Expected results and actual results

Target audience

This white paper is targeted at four key roles that are typically responsible for managing the digital experience for an enterprise, are relevant to the C-suite, or any other role that understands the importance of digital experience to the business.

LOB and IT executives - responsible for ensuring IT supports business goals, i.e., revenue, customer satisfaction, workforce productivity, and cost control, and ensures the success of digital transformation initiatives.

Architect - Responsible for designing and optimizing the architecture of networks, infrastructure and data centers/clouds. The goal is to optimize capacity to minimize costs and ensure high quality and reliable user experience.

Application Developer/Owner - Responsible for developing, delivering, supporting and optimizing business-critical applications, including voice communications. Includes developers and product owners who sit between development and business.

IT Operations/Network Operations - responsible for providing end-to-end service management and problem resolution for applications and networks and the infrastructure they run on. Includes groups that adopt DevPos practices, which will lead to stronger collaboration between these teams and application developers.

According to EMA, a mix of IT executives are primarily responsible for driving digital experience management, with the Director/Vice President of Corporate Marketing/Digital Services being the most likely executive responsible.

Important Definitions

Digital Business – Digital communication, transactions and negotiations between people, businesses and things (machines).

Digital transformation - the application of digital technologies to fundamentally impact all aspects of business.

Digital experience - the human experience that users have when interacting with digital applications and services.

Digital Experience Management - Analyzing and optimizing the delivery of application services to end users/consumers to support business outcomes, service performance, and application design.

DEM is becoming more and more important

Digital Experience Management has evolved from traditional monitoring and network/application performance management and has become a catalyst for the convergence of business and IT. In fact, as shown below, the main use case for DEM is to coordinate the impact of IT services on important business lines of business (LoB).

Figure 1 DEM use case

Despite the growing importance of DEM, companies struggle to support its multiple dimensions and dependencies. Too often, organizations rely on a patchwork of point solutions, forcing IT teams into silos and shifting their focus away from a single goal - delivering the best digital experience. Less than 5% of global enterprises have strategically implemented digital experience monitoring, a foundational component of DEM. Yet, 51% of companies cite lack of technology infrastructure and IT systems as a significant challenge in achieving digital priorities.

Digital transformation is happening

Market trends and analyst forecasts predict that digitalization will continue to gain traction, driven by the massive growth in the number of connected devices, the use of cloud computing, and the need to provide customers with an experience that differentiates them from competitors.

According to the 2016 Gartner CIO Survey, two-thirds of enterprises are investing in digital businesses today. In fact, digital capabilities and IT are the top two areas of investment for CEOs in 2016, according to the survey.

• By 2020, at least 30 billion end-user devices will be connected to the Internet.
• CEOs expect digital revenue to grow by more than 80% by 2020.
• By 2020, digital will drive 58% of all retail sales.
• By 2020, the U.S. B2B digital commerce market will reach $1.13 trillion.
• 89% of businesses expect to compete primarily on customer experience.

As global companies move forward, one step at a time, everything will become digital. While new technologies, business models, and processes can transform an enterprise, make no mistake: the true driver of digital change is the end user and their demand for better, richer, more reliable, more powerful experiences.

Digital Experience Challenges

Digital transformation changes the way businesses engage and interact with their end users. It also changes the way businesses themselves must operate and how they set goals for IT and how they use IT to help achieve competitive differentiation. To succeed, businesses must face the following challenges in their digital journey.

Application lifecycle with multiple issues

Applications are becoming the key to generating business revenue and operational efficiency. Therefore, more and more companies are adopting DevOps practices and Agile methodologies to achieve continuous innovation and quickly develop and deploy new applications and IT-related services.

Typically, the application lifecycle consists of the following steps: assess  design  develop  test  deploy  manage. Typically, IT organizations implement digital experience practices in these phases in very different ways using different methodologies, teams, timelines, and tools.

This can cause problems throughout the lifecycle. Without unified insights and analytics, it is difficult for companies to understand the current performance levels of end users, applications, networks, and infrastructure; to determine the root cause of issues that impact performance; and to identify areas that require new development or accelerated applications.

Invalid tools and tests

EMA research11 shows that many organizations struggle with their digital initiatives primarily due to ineffective DEM tools and instrumentation. As shown below, DEM solutions are least effective in the following areas: root cause analysis, communicating business impact, capturing usage information, and understanding third-party service impact.

Figure 2 The least effective DEM solution

The fact is, nearly 78% of all organizations experience some inconsistency in the quality of their digital experiences, which can have serious implications for the business:

• 60% of business leaders say poor digital experience quality leads to a significant drop in productivity of at least 31%.
• E-commerce website delay is only 1
• seconds can result in $1.6 billion in lost annual sales.
• 89% of business executives say poor application performance has a negative impact on their business.

Complex application delivery architecture

At the center of every digital experience is an application that must be developed and delivered to the user. An application is not just a piece of software code on a server, but is in fact a complex chain of interactions with many moving parts. If any of these parts have issues or malfunctions, the quality of the digital experience will be compromised.

Failures or slowdowns occur across IT domains and can be affected by:

• Multiple services called by application clients,
• data in multiple databases and locations,
• Application servers with complex, multi-tiered, distributed software architecture,
• Physical or virtual servers hosted in local data centers and in the cloud,
• Multiple networks that connect data and services and connect data and services to end users,
• End users who access your application from multiple device types and multiple locations.

Figure 3 Multiple potential causes of poor digital experience

Enterprises frequently rely on a variety of miscellaneous monitoring tools to monitor each "link" in the application delivery chain: network, infrastructure, application, server, etc. Forrester research results show that 64% of organizations use a fragmented approach to technical monitoring. A typical enterprise has 6 to 10 network monitoring and troubleshooting tools available, and 10% of large enterprises have more than 25 tools.

Figure 4 Point Solution

A fragmented approach only provides domain-specific insights, making it more difficult for IT teams to identify what is causing end-user performance issues. Essentially, each team reports that everything is “working” in their area of ​​responsibility, while end users continue to complain about poor quality.

Many organizations adopt a “war room” approach to try to encourage cross-team collaboration by bringing together network engineers, application engineers, and end-user experience engineers. Unfortunately, these events often result in finger pointing and blame rather than collaboration and rapid problem resolution.

These organizations lack the tools to manage their end-user digital experience holistically and understand how each area (infrastructure, network, applications, and even end-user devices) impacts the overall experience. This lack of understanding prevents them from quickly diagnosing and resolving issues and identifying areas that require strategic improvement and acceleration.

The need for unified digital experience management

A single, unified digital experience solution provides end-to-end monitoring and proactive performance insights, which enables companies to innovate faster and with fewer issues in the development and application delivery cycle. It also enables organizations to easily share analytics across multiple domains while providing actionable results for all important process lines across the enterprise. An effective DEM solution should:

• Capture all types of data and transactions from all end-user devices, networks, infrastructure, and applications at a more granular level to enable faster and more effective root cause analysis. Devices and applications can vary widely, but the system must support everything in the environment.
• Provide deep insights into application and network performance, blending and correlating analytics from all domains to provide a one-stop solution for managing performance. Performance monitoring and analysis solutions use built-in "big data" analytics to transform high-volume packet, flow, application and transaction metrics into actionable intelligence. Network planning and configuration solutions should integrate application entity mapping with logical network mapping to provide a view of changes to infrastructure and device configurations that can be blended with network and application performance views.
• Enable proactive problem detection and resolution by using performance insights designed to guide, optimize, and prioritize remediation for application and network performance across hybrid and SD-WAN architectures.
• Measure all steps (including pre-digital transformation) to understand the impact of poor application performance leading to a poor digital experience.
• Providing performance diagnostics and controlled feedback loops at every stage of the software development lifecycle, empowering enterprises to adopt DevOps for faster business innovation and continuous application improvement.
• Provides a common, high-definition data set to enable IT teams to collaborate effectively to quickly and proactively resolve digital experience issues.

Successful results

By successfully implementing digital experience management, companies can expect to gain several benefits, including:

1. Develop and deploy applications and digital services faster

• Identify and resolve defects early in the development cycle
• Understand application behavior in physical, cloud, and containerized environments
• Quickly verify production SLAs

2. Solve problems quickly

• Remove visibility blind spots from application development to delivery
• Drill down across the entire digital experience until you find the problem
• Unify analytics to reduce finger pointing and develop cross-team collaboration

3. Provide better digital services to all end users

• Monitor user satisfaction, response time, adoption and usage trends
• Proactively identify issues before users complain
• Identify areas where network automation and application acceleration (e.g., SD-WAN and WANOP) can improve performance.
• Integrate performance insights with the build toolchain (including incident management and collaboration tools)

4. Evaluate the impact of digital performance

• Measuring the cost of IT changes and their impact on end-user digital experience
• Verify that the desired business outcomes are achieved
• Improve communication of business results to all digital experience stakeholders

in conclusion

To successfully enable digital transformation initiatives, they must also be successfully managed. This means ending the status quo of siloed teams with disparate tools, limited performance insights in development processes and cycles, and blind spots impacting IT capabilities to understand and drill down into all components of the digital experience to truly understand the end-user experience.

As digital channels and services become increasingly important to business growth, enterprises must adopt unified digital experience management. Only by doing so can enterprises accelerate their digital initiatives, ensure high-quality end-user experiences, and optimize business results.