For years, digital transformation has profoundly changed the way organizations market, innovate, and connect with their customers and partners. Today's rapid acceleration in the adoption of cloud services and the widespread use of SaaS applications has created a new level of Internet addiction that is affecting companies' digitization efforts, and with it, the role of the manager. digital. Digitization can be summed up as the meeting of applications and mobility. Together, the two provide frictionless access to data. In less than three years, we expect to reach 300 billion apps downloaded. This evolution of direct access to an ever-widening range of online services has also created a growing demand for usability, along with ever-diminishing patience for bad user experiences. More recently, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to working from home has underscored our reliance on digital solutions as a way of doing business. The adoption of digital transformation has gone from being a mere priority to a key priority for organizations that are now challenged to reinvent the way they do business. But today's digital transformation is different than it was a few years ago, and as a result, the role of the Chief Digital Officer (CDO) is being redefined.
Digitization and customer-centric business model
Since the early days of digital transformation, we have seen the role of the CDO take an increasingly central place, working closely with the CIO to transform traditional operations through digital processes. While the CDO is tasked with rethinking how best to serve customers through digitization and other technical solutions, the scale of his effort was often tied to transformation projects with a beginning and an end. Companies today are increasingly putting customers at the center of everything, which means readjusting the business model accordingly. With an optimized customer experience as the ultimate goal, functions like marketing, sales, and even IT and engineering are increasingly tied to core business development and go-to-market strategies. In this new reality, expectations about the role of the CDO are much broader. The CDO must now internalize the company's vision and express it digitally by implementing new tools, ensuring consistent performance, and accurately assessing technology trends and innovation driving the rapid deployment of products and services.Translate technical indicators into trading metrics
The ability to measure the impact of digitization efforts on the business, and ultimately the bottom line, is critical to this type of customer-centric digital transformation. To this end, the role of the CDO is to translate technical indicators into business measures and their impact on billing and the company's positioning. For example, the CDO should monitor connectivity to provide measurable information on the performance of online applications and services to understand how they impact the customer experience on what is delivered. Another measure of trade is productivity. Just as the customer experience depends on digitization efforts, employees also depend on XNUMX/XNUMX functionality to get their jobs done. With the rapid acceleration of cloud migration in recent years and the widespread use of SaaS applications, companies are facing an increased reliance on the Internet as a delivery mechanism for customer and employee experiences. In short, digital experiences depend more and more on a multitude of external services, be it the cloud, SaaS or the Internet, which are beyond the control of the company. As a means of measurement, more and more companies are turning to what's called the End User Experience Score, which can be conditionally aggregated to translate technical metrics like product load time. page, browser errors and response time, in a score that illustrates the good or bad user experience. For the CDO, even though he doesn't own the underlying IT infrastructure that affects online performance, he still owns the user experience.Manage the cloud and the Internet as your own digital environment
As with many roles that have grown and developed through a process of transformation, such as the sales manager who became a revenue manager or the human resources manager who became responsible for people and culture, the role of the leader it is too. digital manager evolving to include digital management that goes beyond the internal scope to include external cloud and internet-centric environments. This type of digital management requires moving from siled visibility solutions to solutions that can provide insight into the entire digital journey and how each part is driving positive results for users. Gartner defined this shift in focus as a new category called Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), which addresses the shift to a new digital transformation technology that helps businesses regain control over the external environments that impact business. customer and employee experiences. . Scenarios where application performance monitoring (APM) solutions, for example, sufficed, are now being replaced by more comprehensive experience monitoring solutions that can look at application performance as well as infrastructure. underlying environment in which it runs, whether it is on-premises or externally hosted in the cloud. In future digital transformation efforts, the role of the CDO will continue to be one that works in parallel with that of the CIO to drive the kind of experience monitoring solutions needed to ensure consistent online performance and unlock new opportunities. digital, both internally and externally. . In recent months, during the COVID-19 pandemic, this increased reliance on the Internet and cloud infrastructure has worsened as customers and employees now rely on the Internet to do their jobs, and simply put. , live your life. Optimizing digital performance is not just about optimizing experiences, it's also about ensuring that the connected solutions we rely on as a business stay up and running. It's a small piece of the puzzle, but it's getting bigger and for the CDO, it's an opportunity to go to the plate.- Yogi Chandiramani, Vice President of Solutions Engineering for EMEA, ThousandEyes.