For Any Digital Transformation Project, You Need One Thing: Visibility
With more than 4,500 employees spread across the globe, the UK-based investment management company was challenged to support dispersed user groups that depended on highly performing technology to satisfy clients.
Here’s how Lakeside Software’s Digital Experience Cloud, powered by SysTrack, enabled the firm to expand its visibility, achieve a successful VDI rollout, adopt a proactive IT approach, and consistently deliver a quality end-user experience.
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With World Productivity Day fast approaching on June 20, we want to recognize the importance of creating an environment that supports workplace productivity.
If you Google “Top Productivity Killers,” you’ll get a series of expected answers: cell phones, internet browsing, conversations with colleagues, etc. But what’s notably missing are the digital disruptions that impact an employee’s ability to do their job.
In May, we conducted a weekly LinkedIn poll not necessarily to challenge Google’s findings but for us to better understand employee productivity in the
Imagine you’re in the passenger seat of a car during a torrential downpour. The driver doesn’t turn on the windshield wipers. And when you ask them to turn the wipers on, they say, “Don’t need ’em. I have a general sense of where the road is.”
You’d probably start bracing yourself, right?
Good visibility across your IT estate is just as important when embarking on any digital transformation project. And if your organization is mission critical, like a hospital or a bank, you’ll be under even higher pressure to avoid errors and downtime — which good visibility across the IT estate can help prevent.
Imagine you’re in the passenger seat of a car during a torrential downpour. The driver doesn’t turn on the windshield wipers. And when you ask them to turn the wipers on, they say, “Don’t need ’em. I have a general sense of where the road is.”
You’d probably start bracing yourself, right?
Good visibility across your IT estate is just as important when embarking on any digital transformation project. And if your organization is mission critical, like a hospital or a bank, you’ll be under even higher pressure to avoid errors and downtime — which good visibility across the IT estate can help prevent.
Digital transformation projects are daunting, and visibility matters at every stage to ensure that the project does not have a negative impact on the digital employee experience. It’s important to set baselines to measure “before and after” indicators of the end-user experience — whether you’re rolling out Windows 11 across the organization, new digital kiosks throughout a hospital, or implementing an upgraded fleet of hand-held devices across your warehousing facilities.
Informed by baselines, you can set up a pilot group to test rollouts on a smaller scale before going primetime across your full IT estate. During this pilot phase, real-time data from endpoints will allow you to predict early whether the rollout will succeed. If you detect any issues within the initial pilot group, you can adjust and provide additional training, if need be.
It’s a best practice to start with a low-risk user group before rolling out a digital transformation project to high-risk user groups, such as traders in the financial sector. This approach allows teams to troubleshoot issues when they don’t have a significant financial or customer impact. Once the IT team fixes glitches or bugs, they can more confidently roll out the project to high-risk groups.
Without proper visibility into what’s happening across the IT estate during the pilot phase, you risk getting all the way to organization-wide implementation without detecting serious issues that could derail the project and, in turn, affect the digital transformation project timeline and costs.
No matter which industry you’re in, your IT rollout must be done strategically based on data-driven insights from the pilot phase. If you rush your implementation with insufficient insight into system performance, the consequences can be disastrous.
In healthcare, you need to have functional devices to do everything from booking an operating room to making sure doctors and nurses have access to patient charts, x-rays, and other information. And in a field where time saves lives, your devices also need to be fast. Cutting down on load times and avoiding time-consuming workarounds has a real impact on patient satisfaction and possibly even patient care.
For example, when a hospital deploys a new electronic medical record (EMR) system, the rollout typically takes two or three years. Adjusting to a new EMR system is tough for providers and support staff who are already under constant pressure, and the hospital’s IT team will also feel a lot of stress. By monitoring the performance of the system’s endpoints – printers, laptops, tablets, rolling carts, and other machines – a hospital can gather useful data, reallocate resources as necessary, and ensure mission-critical uptime as the system officially goes live.
Financial institutions need good visibility, too, if they hope to avoid losses. A sluggish device can cause slow responses to stock price changes, potentially affecting the bottom line when a trader can’t make a trade in time. If a bank can catch this sluggishness in the pilot phase, it can avoid compounding losses at the go-live phase.
Here are some other things to consider when implementing a digital transformation project:
If you fully understand your current setup, you can target your solution research to find the right approach for your business. After all, a hardware refresh won’t do much if your software needs overhauling, and vice versa. When you know what you have across the IT estate, it’s easy for the IT team to prioritize the actions to take, such as where they should upgrade legacy hardware or software, ensure the right match between hardware and new software versions, or install software patches.
It’s important to build your digital transformation strategy around IT metrics aligned to business outcomes. Target goals should be related primarily to things such as productivity and cost-saving opportunities. For example, load times, downtime, and crashes can cause your company to lose valuable minutes of active work, affecting the digital employee experience and possibly even affecting customer-facing service. Establish your project’s baseline standards using objective performance measures, and you’ll get a much clearer idea of your digital transformation project’s effectiveness at each stage of implementation.
Involve your IT and business stakeholders early and often. Concrete, up-to-date data will make it easier to get buy-in when you propose a targeted solution.
Employees, your end-users, who will be directly affected by any changes to the IT estate – should also be looped into the project. They may not be the decision-makers, but it’s still important to give them a chance to voice their opinions and understand the planned changes.
Any new IT system should be adopted gradually, with a pre-determined timeline based on target KPIs. Not only will this give you a chance to catch issues before they metastasize, but it also will help end users adapt to new workflows and differences in UI/UX. If your organization is anticipating a particularly busy or difficult time in the future, try to give yourself enough time to get the kinks worked out well in advance.
With so many moving parts to consider, it’s important to communicate to the entire IT team who’s responsible for each element of the rollout and to document those roles clearly. You should also document everything else, from goals and budget breakdowns to the data points you’re monitoring to gauge the success of the rollout. Clear roles lead to success, and clear, well-organized documentation is proof of that success.
Every digital transformation project will benefit from greater visibility across your IT estate. For some industries, such as healthcare or financial services, errors and downtime caused by not having visibility could be detrimental to your bottom line and reputation. Successful digital transformation projects include a pilot phase with a low-risk user group to iron out glitches when costs are minimal, and the IT team can quickly act to contain errors. Digital transformation projects must be rolled out strategically with visibility into your IT estate — like a clear windshield during a downpour — to ensure the best result by accelerating your digital journey with mitigated risk.
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