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

When Automating Forever Becomes Faster Than Doing It Once

People want to be doing more engaging work, yet their day often gets overrun by addressing urgent IT tickets. But thanks to advances in AI "vibe coding," where a user describes what they want in plain English and the AI turns it into working code, IT teams can automate ticketing workflows and offload much of that work. Password resets that used to take 5 minutes per request now get resolved automatically ...

Smarter Systems for Disinformation: How Data-Centric Design Could Transform Online Trust

Governments and social platforms face an escalating challenge: hyperrealistic synthetic media now spreads faster than legacy moderation systems can react. From pandemic-related conspiracies to manipulated election content, disinformation has moved beyond "false text" into the realm of convincing audiovisual deception ...

The 5 Pillars of Cross-Platform Observability

Traditional monitoring often stops at uptime and server health without any integrated insights. Cross-platform observability covers not just infrastructure telemetry but also client-side behavior, distributed service interactions, and the contextual data that connects them. Emerging technologies like OpenTelemetry, eBPF, and AI-driven anomaly detection have made this vision more achievable, but only if organizations ground their observability strategy in well-defined pillars. Here are the five foundational pillars of cross-platform observability that modern engineering teams should focus on for seamless platform performance ...

What's Blocking Scalable AI?

For all the attention AI receives in corporate slide decks and strategic roadmaps, many businesses are struggling to translate that ambition into something that holds up at scale. At least, that's the picture that emerged from a recent Forrester study commissioned by Tines ...

Not All Networks Are Built for the Edge

From smart factories and autonomous vehicles to real-time analytics and intelligent building systems, the demand for instant, local data processing is exploding. To meet these needs, organizations are leaning into edge computing. The promise? Faster performance, reduced latency and less strain on centralized infrastructure. But there's a catch: Not every network is ready to support edge deployments ...

Why Observability Is the Missing Piece in Your Business Growth

Every digital customer interaction, every cloud deployment, and every AI model depends on the same foundation: the ability to see, understand, and act on data in real time ... Recent data from Splunk confirms that 74% of the business leaders believe observability is essential to monitoring critical business processes, and 66% feel it's key to understanding user journeys. Because while the unknown is inevitable, observability makes it manageable. Let's explore why ...

Gartner: Regular AI System Assessments Triple the Likelihood of High GenAI Value

Organizations that perform regular audits and assessments of AI system performance and compliance are over three times more likely to achieve high GenAI value than organizations that do not, according to a survey by Gartner ...

Beyond Autoscaling: What True Kubernetes Optimization Actually Requires

Kubernetes has become the backbone of cloud infrastructure, but it's also one of its biggest cost drivers. Recent research shows that 98% of senior IT leaders say Kubernetes now drives cloud spend, yet 91% still can't optimize it effectively. After years of adoption, most organizations have moved past discovery. They know container sprawl, idle resources and reactive scaling inflate costs. What they don't know is how to fix it ...

Is Your Network Ready for the AI Boom? 5 Overlooked Stress Points

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future investment. It's already embedded in how we work — whether through copilots in productivity apps, real-time transcription tools in meetings, or machine learning models fueling analytics and personalization. But while enterprise adoption accelerates, there's one critical area many leaders have yet to examine: Can your network actually support AI at the speed your users expect? ...

Keeping Your Business Stable When Going Through an IT Disaster

The more technology businesses invest in, the more potential attack surfaces they have that can be exploited. Without the right continuity plans in place, the disruptions caused by these attacks can bring operations to a standstill and cause irreparable damage to an organization. It's essential to take the time now to ensure your business has the right tools, processes, and recovery initiatives in place to weather any type of IT disaster that comes up. Here are some effective strategies you can follow to achieve this ...

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

When Automating Forever Becomes Faster Than Doing It Once

People want to be doing more engaging work, yet their day often gets overrun by addressing urgent IT tickets. But thanks to advances in AI "vibe coding," where a user describes what they want in plain English and the AI turns it into working code, IT teams can automate ticketing workflows and offload much of that work. Password resets that used to take 5 minutes per request now get resolved automatically ...

Smarter Systems for Disinformation: How Data-Centric Design Could Transform Online Trust

Governments and social platforms face an escalating challenge: hyperrealistic synthetic media now spreads faster than legacy moderation systems can react. From pandemic-related conspiracies to manipulated election content, disinformation has moved beyond "false text" into the realm of convincing audiovisual deception ...

The 5 Pillars of Cross-Platform Observability

Traditional monitoring often stops at uptime and server health without any integrated insights. Cross-platform observability covers not just infrastructure telemetry but also client-side behavior, distributed service interactions, and the contextual data that connects them. Emerging technologies like OpenTelemetry, eBPF, and AI-driven anomaly detection have made this vision more achievable, but only if organizations ground their observability strategy in well-defined pillars. Here are the five foundational pillars of cross-platform observability that modern engineering teams should focus on for seamless platform performance ...

What's Blocking Scalable AI?

For all the attention AI receives in corporate slide decks and strategic roadmaps, many businesses are struggling to translate that ambition into something that holds up at scale. At least, that's the picture that emerged from a recent Forrester study commissioned by Tines ...

Not All Networks Are Built for the Edge

From smart factories and autonomous vehicles to real-time analytics and intelligent building systems, the demand for instant, local data processing is exploding. To meet these needs, organizations are leaning into edge computing. The promise? Faster performance, reduced latency and less strain on centralized infrastructure. But there's a catch: Not every network is ready to support edge deployments ...

Why Observability Is the Missing Piece in Your Business Growth

Every digital customer interaction, every cloud deployment, and every AI model depends on the same foundation: the ability to see, understand, and act on data in real time ... Recent data from Splunk confirms that 74% of the business leaders believe observability is essential to monitoring critical business processes, and 66% feel it's key to understanding user journeys. Because while the unknown is inevitable, observability makes it manageable. Let's explore why ...

Gartner: Regular AI System Assessments Triple the Likelihood of High GenAI Value

Organizations that perform regular audits and assessments of AI system performance and compliance are over three times more likely to achieve high GenAI value than organizations that do not, according to a survey by Gartner ...

Beyond Autoscaling: What True Kubernetes Optimization Actually Requires

Kubernetes has become the backbone of cloud infrastructure, but it's also one of its biggest cost drivers. Recent research shows that 98% of senior IT leaders say Kubernetes now drives cloud spend, yet 91% still can't optimize it effectively. After years of adoption, most organizations have moved past discovery. They know container sprawl, idle resources and reactive scaling inflate costs. What they don't know is how to fix it ...

Is Your Network Ready for the AI Boom? 5 Overlooked Stress Points

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future investment. It's already embedded in how we work — whether through copilots in productivity apps, real-time transcription tools in meetings, or machine learning models fueling analytics and personalization. But while enterprise adoption accelerates, there's one critical area many leaders have yet to examine: Can your network actually support AI at the speed your users expect? ...

Keeping Your Business Stable When Going Through an IT Disaster

The more technology businesses invest in, the more potential attack surfaces they have that can be exploited. Without the right continuity plans in place, the disruptions caused by these attacks can bring operations to a standstill and cause irreparable damage to an organization. It's essential to take the time now to ensure your business has the right tools, processes, and recovery initiatives in place to weather any type of IT disaster that comes up. Here are some effective strategies you can follow to achieve this ...