Today, experience is at the epicentre of a multitude of factors that shape our perception of brands. From an invigorating interaction with staff at a restaurant to the personal touches taken to make a retail experience memorable — the positive influence of stellar experiences is central. Increasingly, these interactions are now taking place in the digital realm, and consequently, digital experiences are becoming make or break for brands.
And the C-suite is taking notice. In recent research conducted by Cisco, 75 per cent of senior global business leaders reported that digital experience has become a significantly more critical issue for C-level executives in their organization over the last three years. Being output and numbers-driven, these executives aren’t settling for anecdotal evidence.
They are seeking ways to monitor and analyse experience metrics. In particular, they want to know how applications are performing and to understand how application performance is impacting overall business metrics.
As a result, IT teams have found themselves in the hot seat — tasked with optimizing application availability, performance, and security. Far from being a fringe concern, IT is now front and centre, with CIOs under pressure to ensure IT investments are fully aligned with wider business strategy and objectives. The problem is, however, that many IT teams currently don’t have the tools and visibility to effectively manage and optimize application performance, or to track how experience is driving business value.
Business leaders are demanding visibility and insight into the experience
Gone are the days when IT issues — deemed too technical for all but IT professionals — were overlooked by management unless they caused catastrophic issues. Instead, the research reveals that today the performance of business-critical applications and digital services, and their impact on the business, is now reported to C-level executives on a consistent basis in as many as 80% of global organizations. Rewind five years, and this level and type of reporting just wasn’t happening in the vast majority of businesses.
But in 2024, regularly assessing the health of digital services is fundamental. Poor application performance, and unreliable digital channels, can be directly linked to reputational and revenue losses. The C-Suite needs insight if they are to direct the resources needed to mitigate these threats, and capitalize on the opportunities made possible by exceptional digital experiences.
Delivering seamless experiences, an IT dilemma
For IT teams, this C-suite interest in digital experience is something of a double-edged sword. On one hand, C-level executives now realize what technologists have been saying for many years — that application availability, performance, and security is critically important, and that every organization should be directing the right resources and investment to ensure applications are providing end users with consistent seamless digital experiences. On the other hand, however, this heightened focus on experience among senior leaders, piles more pressure onto those IT teams responsible for developing, maintaining and optimizing applications.
Technologists are facing an uphill battle in managing an increasingly complex and dispersed application landscape. The accelerated deployment of cloud native technologies and the shift to hybrid IT environments has left many IT teams without full visibility of their applications, particularly where components are running across cloud native and on-premises technologies.
Most IT departments are still deploying separate monitoring tools for different elements of their application environments, and this means technologists are unable to generate a unified view on how applications are performing. They’re being bombarded with data, with no clear way of making sense of it all. In this deluge of data, they can’t easily detect issues, and even when they do, it is nearly impossible to quickly understand root causes and dependencies to fix issues before they impact end user experience.
It means we’ve reached an unfortunate situation where vast numbers of IT teams are working under relentless pressure, constantly firefighting and scrambling to identify and resolve issues. And of course, the additional scrutiny that is coming from senior leaders within their organizations is only intensifying the pressure technologists are operating under.
Observability, the key to stay competitive in the experience economy
In order for IT teams to match up to board mandates and deliver the experiences customers now demand, they need to implement a comprehensive full-stack observability solution. It provides expanded visibility into cloud native environments to locate and highlight availability, performance, and security issues across application entities. And crucially, it generates a clear, single line of sight for applications spanning across hybrid environments — bringing together telemetry data from cloud native technologies and agent-based entities within legacy applications. This unified visibility and insight are crucial for technologists to cut through complexity and manage soaring volumes of data.
Crucially, it enables them to bridge the gap between IT objectives and management wants. With full-stack observability, IT teams can correlate application data with real-time business metrics, so they can identify and prioritize issues and threats based on potential impact to end-user experience.
With a business lens on application performance data, IT teams can move beyond the firefighting and get ahead, focusing their skills and time on what matters most to customers and, ultimately, to their organizations.
Thanks to clear, business-oriented metrics — such as number of unique sessions, average revenue per session, average revenue per transaction, ‘revenue at risk’ from potential outages, and overall user experience — CIOs can have meaningful engagements with senior leaders, demonstrating how their teams are driving the organisation forward.
And with almost all business leaders (98 per cent) predicting demand from C-level executives, for visibility and reporting into digital experience, will increase over the next two years, all technologists need to ensure they have the tools and insights required to respond.
By implementing a full-stack observability solution, IT teams can deliver the seamless and secure digital experiences customers now expect at all times, and on which business leaders in their organizations are now so focused. And technologists can demonstrate to C-level executives how application performance (and their own skills and efforts) are driving business results.
