01/07/2021
Digital Transformation is a Journey
Investments in digital transformation initiatives have skyrocketed since COVID-19. Organizations have pivoted
to entirely new business models to support flexibility, efficiency and cost control. Mission-critical services of all
kinds are being digitized, like online shopping experiences, remote learning, medical care through telemedicine
or automated supply chain optimization. While 2020 wasn’t easy for any organization, those that are thriving have
embraced a digital service mindset.
Services are critical for organizations to effectively deliver the experiences their stakeholders and end users expect.
A digital service is an online function or capability that fulfills a need for a customer, a digital partner, citizen or
internal consumer.
How do successful organizations transform their services? Digital transformation is a journey that requires a cultural,
technological and operational shift that puts the end-user experience at the forefront. By migrating applications to
cloud-first infrastructure and delivering services digitally, organizations have more freedom to adapt to customer
and business needs. But where to start? What are the critical steps required to begin this journey? Here are seven
steps to consider when transforming your digital services
1. Understand your organization’s cloud strategy.
Identify what critical services are moving to
the cloud. By understanding the organization’s
cloud strategy and what service initiatives are or
are in the process of being digitized, your team
can identify which stakeholders and parts of
the business are ready and open to implement
a modern, customer-centric approach to
service management.
2. Identify your top critical services that matter
most to the organization.
Analyze major customer-facing incidents for
clues about possible pain points and impacted
services. Are there services that executive
leadership consistently follows? Identify critical
stakeholders in operations, development,
security and business who are held accountable
for P1 service outages and incidents.
Then, identify executive stakeholders who are
driving transformation strategy initiatives and
their reasons behind this change. Some business
reasons for transformation include new market
pressures, cost reduction and risk mitigation.
From the technical side, modernization of legacy
infrastructure or new technical expertise and
workforce demand may drive these initiatives.
3. Identify KPIs for one layer of your business.
Once you have identified the top services that
matter most to the business, establish KPIs to
measure success and track goals. First start
with objectives that your team cares about. IT
operations teams can begin monitoring KPIs for
a certain type of infrastructure (e.g., database
performance). Service delivery and assurance
teams can start by monitoring business activity
trends and volumes.
4. Establish shared business KPIs across
multiple teams.
Next, partner with service stakeholders across
departments to determine objectives and goals
that can be shared across teams. These shared
objectives should align to business goals such
as revenue generated or customer satisfaction.
Now more than ever, technical teams have
incentive to align their initiatives to business
objectives. CIOs and IT teams must demonstrate
IT’s business value. Development teams are
increasingly responsible for protecting business
performance as more applications are required
to generate revenue.
Bring business and tech stakeholders together
to define shared KPIs first, then gather the
proper metrics to support those KPIs across the
various departments. You should have already
established your team’s KPIs from Step 3.
5. Capture business architecture and KPIs
across one service.
Using the stakeholder intelligence from the
previous step, document business and technical
KPIs that are related to a single service. Capture
the entire business service architecture and
map its components to associated business and
technical metrics (i.e., the end-to-end business
workflow and supported infrastructure).
Finally, build dashboards that visualize business
and technical KPIs and support root cause
analysis for a service degradation. Go beyond
basic reporting templates to include KPI
definitions and map technology metrics to
the KPIs they support. Create a unified data
repository from across various systems to
collect the metrics for multiple users to view.
6. Establish predictive insights for a service.
With the ability to visualize and monitor a
service end to end, the next step is to set up
and train algorithms to generate predictive
intelligence for a service. Start by piloting
various advanced algorithms on a service.
Don’t implement alerting or response until
this has been validated. Then train machine
learning algorithms on KPI health. These vary
by industry, but examples include mobile
payments performance, citizen services and
claims processing.
7. Create a center of excellence for data.
Expand the monitoring strategy and holistic
framework to more teams and advocate the
benefits of correlating more data into one place.
As more teams adopt this holistic monitoring
strategy, buy-in will get easier. One approach to
convey the value is for teams to see their data
in the new proposed approach. Offer to create
a dashboard for them using your dashboard
framework and platform. When an issue arises,
you can use your intelligence to communicate
what went wrong with their systems.
Finally, enable automation and orchestration
across processes to predict more outages
and reduce remediation times. Include
accountability mechanisms that use data and
analytics to drive efficient workflows and more
automated processes.
Digital transformation is a journey and it doesn’t
happen overnight. By aligning digital services,
supporting teams and technology to business
objectives, you can confidently ensure the
end-user experience is prioritized.
