This blog looks at the post-COVID business rebuilding efforts from the lens of digital performance and ITOps. No industry or business was left untouched by the COVID-19 pandemic. The very DNA of business changed as person-to-person contacts became a business continuity risk. Some peg at two years the return to something closer to pre-COVID times, while many prepare for a future yet unknown. Conservative spending and innovation may seem contradictory, but this marriage will need to work for the business to be able to recover and stay competitive in the new “touchless” economy[1].
A recent McKinsey article was advising CIOs to adopt measures to help cost reduction without affecting capacity.[2] These included managing demand and service levels to avoid unnecessary expenditure, delaying nonessential projects, and letting go of applications with little usage. In a complex, interdependent technological environment, there’s only one way to make these decisions effectively: taking a deep look at the IT infrastructure underpinning all the business’s workflows.
No rocket science here: as in other key business areas, the path to performance lies in collecting and analyzing data. This may seem easy enough to achieve in this day and age, but ironically, at the level of IT infrastructure, collecting the necessary data for optimizing performance is a struggle for many organizations. IT systems have grown in archeological layers as the transformative journey unfolded, from on premise servers to cloud to containers to connected objects to AIOps, to whatever adapting to the touchless economy will be required. Businesses report using dozens of tools to capture the data needed to monitor availability and performance from day to day, which means the aggregated data CIOs need to make crucial decisions is not readily available.
“We have the perfect storm: more IT complexity, more need for data to feed continuous optimization and innovation-driven growth, and fewer resources to do all this in a constricting economy.”
How can that change? Through a fairly accessible, yet evolved process: smart IT infrastructure monitoring. IT agility is business agility in the post-Covid-19 economy. Therefore, business and IT teams need a virtual meeting place: a robust platform to collaborate and generate the data that will drive optimization and innovation efforts. Smart monitoring (or SMART ITIM) provides the perfect platform to build a collaborative culture that demystifies the link between IT and business performance.
Welcome to the touchless economy
The pandemic will go down in history as the beginning of an era in which human contact becomes a business risk. Welcome to the touchless economy—a new paradigm that’s accelerating digital transformation and intensifying the focus on flawless digital experiences. It used to be that the most direct path to customer satisfaction was through human contact. In this new era of social distancing, the most direct path to a customer’s heart is your IT infrastructure.
Improving digital experiences was probably an area of focus pre COVID-19, as part of your efforts to enhance the overall customer experience. In a post COVID-19 world, the digital experience is the experience. This calls for a renewed partnership with IT operations, enabling them with the tools that will allow increased awareness and control over the infrastructure underpinning the superior digital experiences that are essential to business recovery.
Through the magic of open source, the integration power of connectors and advanced automation features, smart monitoring is highly accessible and adaptable to any type of business or IT environment. Try it in your own organization today.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/coronavirus-economy-delivery.html
[2] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/a-practical-way-for-cios-to-manage-it-costs-through-the-covid-19-crisis
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