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 4 covers communication and collaboration.

Start with The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 1

Start with The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 2

Start with The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 3

DASHBOARD

The most important tool to support digital transformation is a customizable dashboard that renders multiple data feeds in terms of business context. The very essence of digital transformation implies that key business stakeholders can quickly take the pulse of their business to steer day to day decisions towards meeting business goals.
Mike Mallo
Offering Management Lead - Hybrid Cloud DevOps, IBM Cloud Unit, IBM Corporation

ALERTING AND NOTIFICATION

Exceptional application performance –— or, the ability to bring to market applications that are fast, reliable and delightful to users –— is a cornerstone of digital transformation. However, as continuous delivery becomes the norm, and development teams must work within dramatically condensed time frames, unexpected performance glitches can seem inevitable. This has led to the rise of the site reliability engineer (SRE), who straddles the roles of developer and operations and works as an arbiter between these two sides when a problem does occur. Not surprisingly, 90 percent of SREs responding in our recent survey noted they cannot live without alerting and notification tools. These enable them to identify conclusively where the source of a problem lies, thus avoiding time wasted finger-pointing and war-rooming.
Dawn Parzych
Director of Product and Solution Marketing, Catchpoint

COMMUNICATION TOOLS

Communication is at the heart of digital transformation, and the most important tool to support a successful transformation is a unified communications system. Recent research from IDC found that companies using unified and contextual cloud communications for both employee and customer connections increase speed-to-market, customer satisfaction and profitability by more than 30 percent. From the individual consumer to the enterprise team, the value of the technology we use to communicate now lies in the experiences it creates. No business transaction happens without communication and teams that communicate better drive more business for the enterprise than teams lacking cutting-edge strategies and tools.
Omar Javaid
Chief Product Officer, Vonage

The most important tool when it comes to transforming any large complex organization is anything you can use to communicate widely to everyone involved in the change. That might be a weekly meeting, it might be the ability to record and publish videos, it might be an internal blog or it might even be good old email lists. The first problem to overcome in many transformations is building momentum, and providing fast feedback on what's working and what needs to change is integral to that. Without constant communication from the center, it's too easy for the spirit of a transformation to be watered down, and everyone to go back to business as usual.
Gareth Rushgrove
Product Manager, Docker

COLLABORATION TOOLS

Digital transformation is fundamentally a cultural phenomenon in which the IT team's focus shifts from just keeping the systems running to playing a pivotal role in the company's adaptation on to a rapidly shifting world of digital threats and opportunities. At the same time, line-of-business managers need to be comfortable with the new tools and technologies at their disposal. As bureaucratic distinctions between IT and business roles decrease, the need for collaboration, communication and common purpose become vital. In this environment, the most important tool needed to support digital transformation is an effective, broadly-adopted and content-rich collaboration and communication platform that spans the organization.
Rich Petersen
President, JetStream Software

There are many reasons organizations can be more productive with a remote workforce, including saving time on commutes, eliminating office distractions and improving focus and creativity. Employees also increasingly appreciate the extra flexibility and work-life balance that remote work offers: 49 percent of employees 50 years or older often work away from traditional offices, along with 70 percent of millennials, and this number is growing. In fact, Gartner predicts that half of the future workforce will work outside the traditional office setting most of the time by 2020. Needless to say, organizations need to implement the necessary policies and collaboration technology to support this trend in order to capitalize on the productivity benefits and avoid losing key talent.
Matt Kaplan
Chief Product Officer, Collaboration Products, LogMeIn

MESSAGING INFRASTRUCTURE

Digital transformation embraces mobile apps, the cloud and the Internet of Things. You'll need a real-time messaging infrastructure to tie it all together: chat, mobile alerts, streams of sensor data and increasingly, AI at the edge.
Jonas Gray
Strategic Partnerships, PubNub

Business process management (BPM)

I always recommend companies choose tools that support both the technological and process changes needed for digital transformation. Business process management tools provide platforms that allow our customers to model the way they work and visualize the information required to execute that work, aiding them in the digital transformation journey. With this visibility, the alignment between people, processes and information becomes clear in a way that enables true transformation.
Jennifer Schwartz
Business Development Consultant, CTG

Read The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 5, all about data.