The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 4

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.

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The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 4

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.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

5 Security Principles Every Entrepreneur Should Apply to Leadership

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Signs It May Be Time to Reassess Your IT Infrastructure Strategy

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Enterprise Edge AI Reaches Inflection Point

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

AI Is Hitting Operational Limits

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

Alert Fatigue Is No Longer a Morale Problem, It's a Reliability Risk and a System Failure

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

Most Enterprises Think They Can Switch AI Vendors in a Month ... Most Who've Tried Couldn't

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Your Observability Stack Has a Telemetry Pipeline Problem

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...