KonMari your organisation strategically to guard against tool sprawl
by Koh Eng Kiong, Regional Director for ASEAN, Japan & Korea, Dynatrace
If you have not heard of Marie Kondo by now, you've been living under a rock. Thanks to her Netflix show, Marie Kondo became a celebrity overnight where her decluttering philosophy struck a chord with viewers worldwide.
While tidying is not a novel concept, tidying up with deep-felt purpose is. According to Kondo, organising things becomes better by going beyond merely categorising them as important or unimportant; she advocates evaluating whether the items have an important role to play in their lives.
This is the key to organisations struggling to figure out how to best serve their consumers across a wide spectrum of digital services.
Now, it may seem a stretch to apply a home organisation philosophy to the increasingly complicated digital landscape that businesses navigate, but the message behind the philosophy is strong: Organise things according to a clear vision.
With this in mind, you would be surprised to hear that the number of organisations whose digital monitoring strategies are stuck in the mud are for far too high.
Digital tool sprawl
Until recently, many organisations relied on their internal teams to source for performance monitoring tools that they felt were best placed to meet their needs. In doing so, businesses were faced with fragmented digital monitoring technologies that forced them to rethink their whole monitoring strategy with tool rationalisation leading the way.
The consequences of this are numerous and extensive. For one, information overload can happen when tools provide too much information for employees to manage digital performance in an efficient manner. Unsurprisingly, too many tools also cost more because employees need to be trained to use each of them individually. In addition, may experience enormous upfront deployment, software and hardware outage, as well as downtime costs.
Modernising operations and accelerating innovation
Today’s multi and hybrid-cloud environments make it harder to monitor user experience. With the rise of cloud-native technologies such as microservices and containers used to build user applications, Internet of Things (IoT) and other infrastructure, it becomes more challenging to monitor digital performance with legacy tools. In fact, staying loyal to old tools creates a roadblock for the organisation, especially when it has plans to scale and modernise its IT operations.
On the side of the modern customer
Today, customers expect that businesses are able to rapidly provide them with solutions to their needs. To deliver outstanding customer service, businesses must be prepared to do whatever it takes to deliver this. In Singapore, some organisations such as banks have already expanded their customer touchpoints to include new forms of engagement in both the traditional and digital space.
To do this, organisational teams should use insights and predictive analysis that only the latest technologies can provide. In addition, technology teams need to understand the impact that back-end system performance has on the end-user, and should proactively work with digital teams to further transform experiences for the user. It is difficult, for example, for customer experience professionals to develop new effective digital customer advocacy programmes or for communications professionals to strategise and plan without the insights and analysis of customer behaviour.
Being on the side of the modern customer isn’t just about transforming customer experiences, however. Even managing digital performance can be tricky with legacy strategies that fail to coordinate to hit organisational goals.
A survey of IT and business professionals by Dynatrace showed that performance issues happen once every five days* and occupy at least 25%* of business and IT professionals’ workdays. Three quarters of respondents also mentioned “low levels” of confidence in their ability to resolve digital performance problems*.
Such results are hardly surprising when employees are simply overwhelmed with too much, and possibly conflicting, information. Legacy tools tend to be unaligned with one another and are designed to flag every error they see. The moment your organisation’s application faces a technical issue that affects multiple facets of the experience, your organisation could receive hundreds (if not thousands) of dashboard alerts.
The case for change has also never been stronger thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI). In recent times, developers have created monitoring tools that use AI to pick out the deeper issues, rather than the red flags themselves. Developers also recognise the limits to the amount of work people can do every day, and have designed these modern tools to prioritise critical issues that need to be resolved as a matter of priority.
Thus, simply rethinking the monitoring strategy will help organisations cut through the noise to develop further visibility into the problems they detect. This may mean picking the right monitoring tool and ditching legacy tools, establishing simpler logical protocols, or even keeping the monitoring strategy simple. Getting it right provides your organisation with more value than using multiple monitoring tools that are unaligned with one another.
Serving customers is the vision
The truth is that understanding online customer experiences should be a simple affair for organisations today as they move to build better digital experiences for their consumers. Keeping the customer in mind while planning digital performance management strategies should relegate the ever-enlarging tool sprawl to the dust.
*https://www.dynatrace.com/news/press-release/it-complexity-and-performances-challenges-killing-digital-transformation-initiatives/
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| Source: Dynatrace. Koh. |
While tidying is not a novel concept, tidying up with deep-felt purpose is. According to Kondo, organising things becomes better by going beyond merely categorising them as important or unimportant; she advocates evaluating whether the items have an important role to play in their lives.
This is the key to organisations struggling to figure out how to best serve their consumers across a wide spectrum of digital services.
Now, it may seem a stretch to apply a home organisation philosophy to the increasingly complicated digital landscape that businesses navigate, but the message behind the philosophy is strong: Organise things according to a clear vision.
With this in mind, you would be surprised to hear that the number of organisations whose digital monitoring strategies are stuck in the mud are for far too high.
Digital tool sprawl
Until recently, many organisations relied on their internal teams to source for performance monitoring tools that they felt were best placed to meet their needs. In doing so, businesses were faced with fragmented digital monitoring technologies that forced them to rethink their whole monitoring strategy with tool rationalisation leading the way.
The consequences of this are numerous and extensive. For one, information overload can happen when tools provide too much information for employees to manage digital performance in an efficient manner. Unsurprisingly, too many tools also cost more because employees need to be trained to use each of them individually. In addition, may experience enormous upfront deployment, software and hardware outage, as well as downtime costs.
Modernising operations and accelerating innovation
Today’s multi and hybrid-cloud environments make it harder to monitor user experience. With the rise of cloud-native technologies such as microservices and containers used to build user applications, Internet of Things (IoT) and other infrastructure, it becomes more challenging to monitor digital performance with legacy tools. In fact, staying loyal to old tools creates a roadblock for the organisation, especially when it has plans to scale and modernise its IT operations.
On the side of the modern customer
Today, customers expect that businesses are able to rapidly provide them with solutions to their needs. To deliver outstanding customer service, businesses must be prepared to do whatever it takes to deliver this. In Singapore, some organisations such as banks have already expanded their customer touchpoints to include new forms of engagement in both the traditional and digital space.
To do this, organisational teams should use insights and predictive analysis that only the latest technologies can provide. In addition, technology teams need to understand the impact that back-end system performance has on the end-user, and should proactively work with digital teams to further transform experiences for the user. It is difficult, for example, for customer experience professionals to develop new effective digital customer advocacy programmes or for communications professionals to strategise and plan without the insights and analysis of customer behaviour.
Being on the side of the modern customer isn’t just about transforming customer experiences, however. Even managing digital performance can be tricky with legacy strategies that fail to coordinate to hit organisational goals.
A survey of IT and business professionals by Dynatrace showed that performance issues happen once every five days* and occupy at least 25%* of business and IT professionals’ workdays. Three quarters of respondents also mentioned “low levels” of confidence in their ability to resolve digital performance problems*.
Such results are hardly surprising when employees are simply overwhelmed with too much, and possibly conflicting, information. Legacy tools tend to be unaligned with one another and are designed to flag every error they see. The moment your organisation’s application faces a technical issue that affects multiple facets of the experience, your organisation could receive hundreds (if not thousands) of dashboard alerts.
The case for change has also never been stronger thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI). In recent times, developers have created monitoring tools that use AI to pick out the deeper issues, rather than the red flags themselves. Developers also recognise the limits to the amount of work people can do every day, and have designed these modern tools to prioritise critical issues that need to be resolved as a matter of priority.
Thus, simply rethinking the monitoring strategy will help organisations cut through the noise to develop further visibility into the problems they detect. This may mean picking the right monitoring tool and ditching legacy tools, establishing simpler logical protocols, or even keeping the monitoring strategy simple. Getting it right provides your organisation with more value than using multiple monitoring tools that are unaligned with one another.
Serving customers is the vision
The truth is that understanding online customer experiences should be a simple affair for organisations today as they move to build better digital experiences for their consumers. Keeping the customer in mind while planning digital performance management strategies should relegate the ever-enlarging tool sprawl to the dust.
*https://www.dynatrace.com/news/press-release/it-complexity-and-performances-challenges-killing-digital-transformation-initiatives/
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