The way we consume technology is changing rapidly, and the term digital transformation seems to be used in many ways. So, what does it mean? To me it means that organizations have adopted their technology base, and have workflows and processes in place that are successful. But now with technologic advancements changing and reshaping how we do IT, the way we use technology is changing. This is Digital Transformation!
Before we get into how this impacts your organization, and where monitoring can help, let’s first consider this. When we look at how our options for technology consumption are advancing with the introduction of many different things such as cloud, artificial intelligence, automation, internet of things, advanced analytics, and more. It would seem that it truly is a time of digital transformation. The solid technology that is running our organizations today will not be the same for tomorrow.
Are you Ready?
When an organization starts evaluating its processes, can anyone really ever be ready for the type of change that is likely coming to the enterprise? Which projects do we put our efforts toward? The truth is that that we will never be ready, but we need to be adaptable. We need to be wise with how we choose to spend our time, and this really comes down to the toolsets we use to do our job today, how we monitor them, and ensure their stability. If we monitor the existing infrastructure well, we will have the time for innovating and implementing our business infrastructure tomorrow. No matter what the end result looks like.
Get Serious about Monitoring
I personally feel that organizations do not pay enough attention to monitoring. Rarely is it ever done right or with the time and attention to ensure that it’s successful. To date, over and over infrastructure and application monitoring is one of those things that rarely gets the configuration attention that it needs. To top it off, it can also be challenging to find a common monitoring solution for all of IT, and then almost never gets a dedicated resource for deployment. So if you are serious about digital transformation, you will need to get serious about how you are monitoring your infrastructure.
The Real World – Monitoring Gone Wrong
I can remember in early 2000s no one really talked about monitoring. Most solutions didn’t come with monitoring and no one really talked about it. There was a learning curve happening. Once we were able to get past the fact that we needed monitoring, we believed that all alerts our tools came with were valuable. Yes, we needed them all no matter what our infrastructure design was. Wrong! On-call teams quickly learnt that their pagers (yes, pagers) were going off all times of the day and night, many of them false alarms.
Today we are a bit wiser, and we don’t enable all notifications. That being said it is common to still do a broad-spectrum implementation, instead of one with thought and granularity around what it really needed. Still leaving administrators and architects being paged at all hours of the day. Not fun!
Stop Firefighting IT Problems
I caution you today, that if your monitoring solution is not configured to its fullest potential, and doesn’t bridge the gaps between the needs of all of IT then it’s time to put this project to the front of the line. Your teams are losing valuable time on false positives, and lost efficiencies working on tracking down issues that aren’t really issues.
It’s time to get away from firefighting, and move to a proactive monitoring approach. Make monitoring a project with a dedicated team, and get this done right, and most importantly keep user-experience in mind as the measurement for success.
The Business
Still not convinced? Let’s take a look at what your real IT reputation is to the business? If you said your reputation is good, how did you measure that success? Do they trust that you will keep their systems online, or are they negative toward your department?
Infrastructure monitoring can no longer be an island. Application visibility to IT staff is especially key to the growing trend of DevOps. Collaboration between the different teams in IT where teams have full insight into the big picture of the problem at hand, will make life easy for the teams with no more stressful war-room conversations, but also get them to work together efficiently to accelerate the business goals.
Also, the monitoring you do needs to have depth. Metrics and trend line graphics are a thing of the past. Monitoring solutions must have insightful visualization, and help solve real world user experience challenges to help enterprise stay in competition in this day and age. All of this will help speed up the innovations IT will bring to the business.
IT transformation starts with leadership, and understanding the business. Strong communication between leadership and other business leaders will help you transform your reputation to the organization. If your reputation is already good, then get it to great!
Taking a proactive approach to communication, environment uptime, and monitoring will ensure success within your IT organization! Also, the IT teams carry the maximum load of this transformation, but are not the only ones. Collaboration across different departments within the organization is key.
Digital Transformation Today!
The journey to digital transformation is starting now, so the path to get there is relatively unknown. With all of the new technology options available a new and exciting journey is beginning. The newness of it can create uncertainty. To ensure success we can take the hard lessons of the past, and turn them into learning opportunities for today. This starts with making sure our current infrastructure is monitored, but more importantly monitored correctly. Making sure all system alerts are actionable, and the firefighting stops today! Knowing your current systems and applications and dependencies that exist between them is key for organizations to understand the feasibility of this migration or transformation.
Also, when you have too many monitoring solutions, who face the challenge of not seeing the full picture, where do you start when you have a problem? What do you do when the silo solutions disagree?
Once monitoring is done right, IT Digital Transformation can occur. Your team will have both time and confidence as it moves into this new era of IT. This approach will make a big difference for your IT reputation and team success today!
This post was sponsored by Uila.
Click the link below and learn more about how their monitoring solutions can start your IT Digital Transformation today!
