Imagine you're responsible for keeping your company’s IT endponts up and running smoothly, but instead of using real-time data and analytics, you're relying on gut instinct, guesswork, and outdated reports. When issues arise, there’s no clear visibility into what’s happening—just vague assumptions.
That’s exactly what it’s like to run IT operations without clear visibility enabled by data. The question is, how long can you afford to operate in the dark before a critical failure occurs? How will the end user be affected?
That’s why having good visibility across your IT estate is crucial before embarking on any widespread IT transformation project. And if your organization is mission critical, such as 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.
Why visibility matters for digital transformation projects
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 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.
The importance of rolling out a digital transformation project strategically
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.
Other important factors for a good rollout
Here are some other things to consider when implementing a digital transformation project:
Targeted research
If you fully understand your current infrastructure, you can target your solution research to find the right approach for your business. After all, a software update won’t do much good if your hardware estate cannot accommodate the upgraded versions, and vice versa. That’s why visibility is so important for any IT transformation project. 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.
Using hard, business-based metrics
It’s important to build your IT 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 baselines using objective performance measures, and you’ll get a much clearer idea of your digital transformation project’s effectiveness at each stage of implementation.
Communication and buy-in
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, and whomever else 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 ensure they understand the planned changes and what to expect.
Timelines
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 cause problems on a larger scale, 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.
Roles and documentation
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. Finally, do not forget about user compliance based on user roles and software assignments. Do you have visibility to shadow IT and, now, even shadow AI? A digital employee experience monitoring solution that uses endpoint data can provide this complete visibility you need.
Digital transformation projects require visibility
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.
