We’ve seen many disruptive innovations that have transformed the way we shop, travel, bank, and even the way we communicate with loved ones. Now more than ever, businesses are increasingly dependent on technology as a key component to serving their customers in a digital world.
Applications and digital services have become a virtual front door, helping businesses to service and maintain their customers. As a result, the ability to provide a flawless user experience has never been more critical. With a growing list of vendors and providers to choose from for their needs, consumers won’t tolerate poor performance. The brands that survive are the ones that can innovate and keep up with their competitors to deliver a robust experience.
Tools and Full-Stack Observability
Monitoring tools within the IT department now contribute to the same siloed structure we’ve seen over the past couple decades. When the network team is only leveraging a tool that allows them to see their network—although still helpful— it falls short of helping the team understand all the connectivity points within the application.
Shifting to a solution that provides full-stack observability enables everyone to have a clearer understanding of everything going on within the application. This allows independent teams to quickly understand the impact of their efforts on other teams, and enables immediate visibility into issues.
Additionally, the involvement of cloud services has transformed full-stack observability from a ‘nice-to-have’ to a ‘must-have’. With such rapid innovations occurring, leveraging cloud services has been the primary go-to, however, this has also introduced tech sprawl challenges where the application topology is spanning across multi-cloud deployments, with interconnectivity to legacy on-premise services. Full-stack observability must provide the performance of an application concerning the business.
Full-stack Lead with Business Outcomes
With such a high dependency on technology, it’s critical to align business leaders with IT teams and set a target based on the desired business outcome. Whether your organisation aims to introduce a new revenue stream, grow the existing customer base, or improve the user experience of an existing digital service, the goals must be clearly defined so everyone understands their purpose.
By defining a business-driven goal, IT teams can gain a better understanding of how their efforts roll up to the larger goals of the organisation. When members of the business team are included in the innovation process, it helps keep goals in check while building trust with IT.
Innovation is the foundation for all companies looking to grow and stay relevant. The competition is fierce— we must continue optimising to deliver faster results. Now is the time for businesses to analyse internal operations so they can be in a position to adjust, change, and ultimately, grow. Organisations need to be asking themselves: do my teams have the right tools to quickly innovate? Do we know how our technological investments are impacting the business?
Time is of the essence. It’s not too late to optimise your innovation methods. If you haven’t already restructured your internal processes and implemented the correct tools to provide full-stack observability with business context, don’t let yourself fall behind.
