APMdigest asked experts from across the IT industry — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — for their opinions on the essential tools to support digital transformation. Part 3 covers analytics, AI and machine learning.
Start with The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 1
Start with The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 2
Advanced IT Analytics (AIA)
While there are many critical areas of technology innovation currently evolving in IT, the most powerful and transformative are advanced analytic capabilities, often integrated with insights into service (application/infrastructure) interdependencies. What EMA calls advanced IT analytics (AIA), and many in the industry call "AIOps," is an arena of fast-paced innovation in many dimensions, with diverse options for investment, and benefits ranging from improved IT-to-business alignment, improved business performance, dramatic values in toolset consolidation and unifying IT, as well as core strengths in dramatic reductions in mean-time-to-repair, as just some examples. Whether AIA can properly be called a tool or not, it typically helps to assimilate many different toolsets into a new, cross-domain layer designed for proactive rather than reactive IT management and planning.
Dennis Drogseth
VP of Research, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)
Artificial intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a mission-critical tool to support digital transformation. New development platforms like cloud and microservices enable enterprises to reach new market opportunities faster. On the flip side, more than three-quarters of CIOs around the world believe these new applications are so complex that IT is becoming almost unmanageable. As many small teams work together, getting consistent end-to-end visibility is more challenging, but also more important. Many companies try to solve this problem by growing their operations team, leading to a higher time investment and eventually increased costs. When looking at the problem more closely, it becomes obvious that most time is spent in analyzing data in the context of the impact on the business. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) can help. AI-based systems can find the root cause of problems in milliseconds no matter how complex a system, ultimately resolving application problems before customers are impacted. The next step is to use AI-based virtual assistants, which understand natural language and can provide actionable answers to complex digital performance questions in real-time. And, by simplifying conversations that can be held over voice or chat, AI help expand the use of operational data beyond IT experts.
Alois Reitbauer
Chief Technology Strategist, Dynatrace
MACHINE LEARNING
The most important tool to support digital transformation is a modern, scalable, and fast data analytics platform with machine learning built-in. Unencumbered by legacy databases, digital economy companies disrupt traditional industries with agile approaches and modern, open analytical platforms to derive insight from heavy volumes of data right now — and not later after they have missed their opportunity. Traditional industry players are equally data driven, moving as quickly as they can to modernize their data warehouses and analytical stores and avoid disruption and minimize customer churn. Start-ups with fresh rounds of funding and 100-year old banks each understand a modern data analytical platform with machine learning built-in is imperative to digital transformation.
Jeff Healey
Senior Director of Vertica Product Marketing, Micro Focus
KPI ADVANCEMENT TOOLS
A company's ability to differentiate and win now rests largely on how expeditiously they can respond to changing business needs by rolling out high-performing, innovative online products and services. Businesses need highly productive development teams that excel across three areas: quality, velocity and efficiency. Development leaders need KPI advancement tools leveraging empirical data to guide smart decisions that drive improvements in all of these areas. Many organizations continue to rely heavily on mainframe processing. Therefore, digital transformation requires tools that go beyond just integrating the mainframe more fully into developer environments, to actually amplifying developer productivity on the platform.
Sam Knutson
VP of Product Management, Compuware
WORKSPACE ANALYTICS
The most important tool that an organization needs to drive digital transformation is access to workspace analytics. To improve the performance of its end users, an organization must have visibility into how issues experienced at the endpoint are impacting productivity. Analytics can link client-side end-user facing data regarding VDI sessions with the usage of guest resources within infrastructure environments. This collected data can then be tied back into the VDI session, presenting IT with telemetry they can then use to monitor, analyze and optimize endpoint performance within their end-user computing environments.
Simon Clephan
VP of Business Development and Strategic Alliances, IGEL
monitoring integration as a service (MIaaS)
Digital transformation has the tendency to create monitoring blind spots. You've got one foot in the cloud, one foot on prem. You're wading into DevOps and real-time analytics. You need something that's going to bring it all together for you. That's why I recommend a monitoring integration as a service (MIaaS) platform.
Moria Fredrickson
Director of Marketing, Blue Medora
Read The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 4, covering communication and collaboration.
The Latest
One common infrastructure challenge arises with virtual private networks (VPNs). VPNs have long been relied upon to deliver the network connectivity and security enterprises required at a price they could afford. Organizations still routinely turn to them to provide internal and trusted third-parties with "secure" remote access to isolated networks. However, with the rise in mobile, IoT, multi- and hybrid-cloud, as well as edge computing, traditional enterprise perimeters are extending and becoming blurred ...
The configuration management database (CMDB), along with its more federated companion, the configuration management system (CMS), has been bathed in a deluge of negative opinions from all fronts — industry experts, vendors, and IT professionals. But from what recent EMA research on analytics, ITSM performance and other areas is indicating, those negative views seem to be missing out on a real undercurrent of truth — that CMDB/CMS alignments, whatever their defects, strongly skew to success in terms of overall IT progressiveness and effectiveness ...
The on-demand economy has transformed the way we move around, eat, learn, travel and connect at a massive scale. However, with disruption and big aspirations comes big, complex challenges. To take these challenges head-on, on-demand economy companies are finding new ways to deliver their services and products to an audience with ever-increasing expectations, and that's what we'll look at in this blog ...
To thrive in today's highly competitive digital business landscape, organizations must harness their "digital DNA." In other words, they need to connect all of their systems and databases — including various business applications, devices, big data and any instances of IoT and hybrid cloud environments — so they're accessible and actionable. By integrating all existing components and new technologies, organizations can gain a comprehensive, trusted view of their business functions, thereby enabling more agile deployment processes and ensuring scalable growth and relevance over the long-term ...
Advancements in technology innovation are happening so quickly, the decision of where and when to transform can be a moving target for businesses. When done well, digital transformation improves the customer experience while optimizing operational efficiency. To get there, enterprises must encourage experimentation to overcome organizational obstacles. In other words ...
IoT adoption is growing rapidly, and respondents believe 30% of their company’s revenue two years from now will be due to IoT, according to the new IoT Signals report from Microsoft Corp ...
It's been all over the news the last few months. After two fatal crashes, Boeing was forced to ground its 737. The doomed model is now undergoing extensive testing to get it back into service and production. Large organizations often tell stakeholders that even though all software goes through extensive testing, this type of thing “just happens.” But that is exactly the problem. While the human component of application development and testing won't go away, it can be eased and supplemented by far more efficient and automated methods to proactively determine software health and identify flaws ...
Despite significant investment in AI, many companies are still struggling to stabilize and scale their AI initiatives, according to State of Development and Operations of AI Applications 2019 from Dotscience ...
IT has two principal functions: create a network that satisfies the business needs of the company and then optimize that network. Unfortunately, the modern enterprise is buried under a myriad of network improvement projects that often do not get deployed ...
Even large companies are not yet realizing the potential of digital transformation, according to a new study from Cherwell Software, The Power of Process Integration in the Information Age ...
