Seven Steps to a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy

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WHITE PAPER Seven Steps to a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy

Transcript of Seven Steps to a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy

Page 1: Seven Steps to a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy

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Seven Steps to a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy

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Seven Steps to a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy

Digital Transformation is a JourneyInvestments 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. Understandyourorganization’scloudstrategy. 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. Identifyyourtopcriticalservicesthatmattermosttotheorganization. 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. IdentifyKPIsforonelayerofyourbusiness. 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. EstablishsharedbusinessKPIsacrossmultipleteams. 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.

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5. CapturebusinessarchitectureandKPIsacrossoneservice. 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. Establishpredictiveinsightsforaservice. 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. Createacenterofexcellencefordata. 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.

For more information on digital services and digital transformation, visit splunk.com/it-operations.