The year 2020 is definitely the year that we will remember for years to come. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought disruptions that we did not expect. It has forced many businesses to hasten their efforts in digital transformation.
Nevertheless, no matter which industry you operate in, data play a significant role even before the pandemic. Plus, it plays an even important part in more months to come as digital transactions continue to be preferred instead of face-to-face.
You can translate the data that you have collected from consumers into meaningful and actionable insights. You will be able to understand the customer experience better, determine which products are performing or not, and price products optimally.
At the same time, many companies fail to find a consistent way to evaluate the success of their website and indeed the digital consumer experience because they use various methods and instrumentation to analyze the data, resulting in departmental and technical silos.
“Before you can think about the kind of insights you want, you have to have enough meaningful data from which to derive the insights, and there is a breakthrough barrier, so to speak, to achieving that data threshold,” says Mr. Ben Goodman, senior vice-president of Asia at New Relic, a cloud-based observability platform that helps businesses track and optimize website and application performance.
The growing difference between the people who create digital services, the developers, and those who make critical decisions is a key problem here. Business units are pressing developers to innovate and make data-driven decisions, but the resources they need to use at infinity are often not provided, primarily due to commercial constraints associated with the way technology investments are produced.
Unfortunately, the company would find it difficult to use the data from its digital platforms meaningfully by not offering developers the resources and insights they need.
What organizations need is a highly scalable, observability framework that connects all the telemetry data of a system—metrics, incidents, logs, and traces—in one platform to remove data silos and provide greater insight through their tech stack. We will need a framework that can produce data visualizations and dashboards that decision-makers that understand the effect that the consumer experience has on the bottom line of the business can easily absorb.
Developers have historically had to prioritize which infrastructure components they want to control. They may have attempted to track those with the greatest consumer knowledge, but they simply did not have the details, resources, or investment to do it to the necessary degree. It is not a model that works adequately in practice or on a scale, nor does it cultivate a positive experience for developers.
Businesses need to consider how their overall business priorities explicitly align with the resources they offer to their developers to improve and optimize the customer experience. The big question for the company then is to smartly structure the investment.
