Breaking the Barriers to a Digital Transformation

Aaron Rudger

With more consumers on mobile devices and connected across social channels, customers have become more empowered and in control of their relationships with brands. For many companies, the only way to grow their revenue is to become customer-obsessed. By examining their current business approach and transforming their strategy to digital, organizations have the opportunity to better align customer experiences to their initiatives that drive the top line.

While shaping a digital strategy around customer metrics is a top focus for organizations, its execution requires both business and IT teams to collaborate and consistently deliver experiences using the underlying technology performance. IT failures due to infrastructure, third party services or the customer’s environment are common sources of reduced engagement and business disruptions.

A recently study by Forrester Consulting — Mind the Gap: A Study of Digital Strategy and Alignment Between Business and IT — found that 78 percent of respondents in the line of business do not believe their organizations have the performance capabilities needed to inform a digital strategy now or in the foreseeable future.

Performance is Often the Weak Link in the Delivery Chain

Over the past 12 months, 41% of companies surveyed experienced performance issues with their websites, mobile apps or other digital assets. An alarming 4 percent of companies did not know if they had performance issues. With much riding on digital initiatives and the customer experience, performance monitoring and analytics are vital to ensuring a seamless delivery.

The study also found that:

■ Loss of worker productivity (47 percent), loss of revenue (43 percent) and loss of customer loyalty (37 percent) were recognized as the most common consequences of website or mobile app performance issues.

■ Infrastructure or network-related failures (54 percent) were ranked as the most significant contributor to performance issues experienced in the last 12 months.

Performance Issues Are Caused by Both Internal and External Factors

Customer metrics and performance have a symbiotic relationship – without responsiveness or proper performance benchmarking, abandonment rates may increase and repeat visitors decrease.

Knowing the points of control across digital channels, which can be caused internal as well as external variables, can help organizations effectively manage the customers’ digital experience. Issues may arise internally from the company’s infrastructure, network or application, or it can arise from outside of IT’s control that are specific to the user environment. Third-party content and managed service providers also create more room for variables to contribute to sub-optimal performance.

Shared Goals and Metrics are Critical

Even if decision-makers of digital transformation are sitting in different parts of the organization, everyone should be looking at the same health indicators. The findings from the Forrester study reveal that IT has a better view over three key digital metrics in relation to their business counterparts: new user growth, responsiveness, and repeat visitors (retention). With access to these technical metrics, IT needs to help their business counterparts guide the digital strategy. Just because the lines of business owners may not be ‘technically’ inclined doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have a vested interest in monitoring the performance of digital channels. A drop in performance, after all, can have a direct effect on customer metrics.

The transformation to digital can help inform a company’s strategy. It will require more than just new titles like Chief Digital Officer having a seat at the table. Cultivating an understanding between customers, business and IT, as well as the capabilities and functions they enable is a start to understand where to prioritize your attention and resources in the transformation. Running an agile business to meet the needs of customers and expanding your competitive advantage that retains their attention requires a new model

Aaron Rudger is Director of Product Marketing at Keynote.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Keys to Building a Partner Ecosystem That Scales

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

5 Takeaways from the Observability Forecast for Media and Entertainment

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Why Moving Off the Cloud Is the Easy Part and What Comes Next Is Where Things Get Hard

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

Breaking the Barriers to a Digital Transformation

Aaron Rudger

With more consumers on mobile devices and connected across social channels, customers have become more empowered and in control of their relationships with brands. For many companies, the only way to grow their revenue is to become customer-obsessed. By examining their current business approach and transforming their strategy to digital, organizations have the opportunity to better align customer experiences to their initiatives that drive the top line.

While shaping a digital strategy around customer metrics is a top focus for organizations, its execution requires both business and IT teams to collaborate and consistently deliver experiences using the underlying technology performance. IT failures due to infrastructure, third party services or the customer’s environment are common sources of reduced engagement and business disruptions.

A recently study by Forrester Consulting — Mind the Gap: A Study of Digital Strategy and Alignment Between Business and IT — found that 78 percent of respondents in the line of business do not believe their organizations have the performance capabilities needed to inform a digital strategy now or in the foreseeable future.

Performance is Often the Weak Link in the Delivery Chain

Over the past 12 months, 41% of companies surveyed experienced performance issues with their websites, mobile apps or other digital assets. An alarming 4 percent of companies did not know if they had performance issues. With much riding on digital initiatives and the customer experience, performance monitoring and analytics are vital to ensuring a seamless delivery.

The study also found that:

■ Loss of worker productivity (47 percent), loss of revenue (43 percent) and loss of customer loyalty (37 percent) were recognized as the most common consequences of website or mobile app performance issues.

■ Infrastructure or network-related failures (54 percent) were ranked as the most significant contributor to performance issues experienced in the last 12 months.

Performance Issues Are Caused by Both Internal and External Factors

Customer metrics and performance have a symbiotic relationship – without responsiveness or proper performance benchmarking, abandonment rates may increase and repeat visitors decrease.

Knowing the points of control across digital channels, which can be caused internal as well as external variables, can help organizations effectively manage the customers’ digital experience. Issues may arise internally from the company’s infrastructure, network or application, or it can arise from outside of IT’s control that are specific to the user environment. Third-party content and managed service providers also create more room for variables to contribute to sub-optimal performance.

Shared Goals and Metrics are Critical

Even if decision-makers of digital transformation are sitting in different parts of the organization, everyone should be looking at the same health indicators. The findings from the Forrester study reveal that IT has a better view over three key digital metrics in relation to their business counterparts: new user growth, responsiveness, and repeat visitors (retention). With access to these technical metrics, IT needs to help their business counterparts guide the digital strategy. Just because the lines of business owners may not be ‘technically’ inclined doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have a vested interest in monitoring the performance of digital channels. A drop in performance, after all, can have a direct effect on customer metrics.

The transformation to digital can help inform a company’s strategy. It will require more than just new titles like Chief Digital Officer having a seat at the table. Cultivating an understanding between customers, business and IT, as well as the capabilities and functions they enable is a start to understand where to prioritize your attention and resources in the transformation. Running an agile business to meet the needs of customers and expanding your competitive advantage that retains their attention requires a new model

Aaron Rudger is Director of Product Marketing at Keynote.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Keys to Building a Partner Ecosystem That Scales

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

5 Takeaways from the Observability Forecast for Media and Entertainment

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Why Moving Off the Cloud Is the Easy Part and What Comes Next Is Where Things Get Hard

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...