In the past few years, Digital (Business) Transformation has been an important goal that every organization has chased — especially after COVID-19 forced businesses to go digital almost overnight. The massive impact of these initiatives is revealed in the new MuleSoft's 2022 Connectivity Benchmark Report (based on a survey of 1,050 IT leaders around the globe) which showed that organizations could lose an average of nearly seven million dollars in revenue by failing to complete their Digital Transformation because almost three out of four customer interactions now happen digitally.
As Digital Transformation accelerates now at a much faster pace than just five years ago, most C-Level managers are definitely feeling the pressure to succeed. They reprioritized ongoing Digital Transformation projects, are heavily invested in new technology to boost digital customer experiences, and significantly increased IT budgets, which were somewhat stagnant in the most recent pre-COVID years.
Despite the additional budget and management attention, an astonishing 52% of IT projects (Source: MuleSoft study) were not delivered on time in 2021. In all fairness, the number of projects also increased by 40%, but existing (outdated) infrastructure (Source: MuleSoft study) often hinders project delivery and, with it, innovation. In addition to slowing project delivery, old infrastructure as well as challenges with security and governance, and the lack of IT agility are becoming major obstacles for Digital Transformation as more than half of the surveyed organizations are not able to integrate user experiences across different channels.
Having said all this, how can you be certain that your Digital Transformation is successful on a very granular level? How do you measure the experiences your customers and users are having as they interact with your company? And how can you ensure that you are constantly maintaining and even improving your digital experiences? This is where Digital Experience Monitoring and Analytics come in!
Gartner defines Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) as an
"availability and performance monitoring discipline that supports the optimization of the operational experience and behavior of a digital agent, human or machine, as it interacts with enterprise applications and services.”
In addition to Application Discovery, Tracing, and Diagnostics (ADTD), and Application Analytics (AA), the analyst firm views DEM as one of three dimensions in the Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability Market.
Coming from an IT Transformation and Evergreen IT Management background and providing Workplace Automation Management tooling, Juriba views Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) or, as we call it, Digital User Experience Monitoring & Analytics (UXM) as a natural extension to our solutions. Performance management and optimization of application services, such as websites/web applications, enterprise applications, SaaS services, VDI technologies such as Citrix, and even critical collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, from a user perspective, is the last crucial mile in Workplace Automation.
For us, UXM is the only and true way to effectively measure IT service level agreements and IT service management as this is analyzing the real-world outcome — the actual experience a user is having. Only if we have a complete and accurate understanding of the application or device performance from an end-user point of view can we, as IT departments, truly and effectively transform digital experiences. This includes measuring and reporting application response times, device boot times and the like as this allows IT teams to validate end user experience.
By utilizing Digital User Experience Monitoring (DEM), organizations can take advantage of the following benefits:
Needless to say, large organizations not only can prevent losing money caused by failed Digital Transformation projects but can even increase profitability and revenue by implementing Digital User Experience Monitoring & Analytics solutions. That is why Juriba has been working closely with market options such as NexThink, Lakeside, and Aternity for years to help customers and partners make better decisions on their project prioritization and workloads, as well as automating some of the outcomes based on the data.
I look forward to exploring this topic with you further in the coming months! Stay tuned.