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On Tuesday, April 13, at 11 a.m. PST/2 p.m. EST/7 p.m. GMT, @eWEEKNews will host its 97th monthly #eWEEKChat. The topic will be “The Home as Enterprise Branch,” and it will be moderated by Chris Preimesberger, eWEEK’s Editor in Chief.
Some quick facts:
Topic: #eWEEKchat April 13: “The Home as Enterprise Branch”
Date/time: Tuesday, April 13, 11 a.m. PST/2 p.m. EST/7 p.m. GMT
Tweetchat handle: You can use #eWEEKChat to follow/participate via Twitter itself, but it’s easier and more efficient to use the real-time chat room link at CrowdChat. Instructions are on that page; log in at the top right, use your Twitter handle to register, and the chat begins promptly at 11am PT. The page will come alive at that time with the real-time discussion. You can join in or simply watch the discussion as it is created. Special thanks to John Furrier of SiliconAngle.com for developing the CrowdChat app.
Special guest experts: David Gewirtz, CBS Interactive Distinguished Lecturer, ZDNet/CNET columnist, ZATZ founder; Vineet Jain, CEO of Egnyte; Gorka Sadowski, Chief Strategy Officer at @Exabeam; Daniel Graves, CTO of Delphix.
Chat room real-time link: Use https://www.crowdchat.net/eweekchat. Sign in with your Twitter handle and use #eweekchat for the identifier.
Where we’ve been, where we’re going in post-pandemic
Even though the coronavirus pandemic has been impacting the globe demonstrably for a full year, enterprises are still adjusting their business approaches to continue to work efficiently. COVID-19 has forced both consumers and companies into a new digital reality.
Prior to the pandemic, 70% of companies had a digital transformation initiative in place or were working on one. The organizations that had not prioritized digital transformation have been forced to change course and build operational resiliency quickly to deliver experiences for customers and employees. This quick pivot to and rapid deployment of new digital services have come at a real cost, impacting developers, site reliability engineers and DevOps practitioners.
A recent survey from digital service availability platform provider xMatters of 300 consumers and 300 IT professionals in companies of at least 500 employees found that more than half of consumers experienced increased digital service problems during the work-from-home period, despite IT professionals’ confidence in the services. It also revealed that the surge in reliance on digital services during COVID-19 is straining IT teams’ digital transformation readiness and work-life balance.
Digital transformation is critical–not only to compete, but to survive. However, it doesn’t have to be an overwhelming transition. In this month’s #eWEEKchat, we’ll discuss how enterprise organizations adapt and digitally transform during and post-COVID-19. We will include some ideas first explained by xMatters CEO Troy McAlpin in an eWEEK Data Points article a while back. Highlights:
Data Point No. 1: Address user concerns immediately and improve the customer experience.
Absolute consumer and employee reliance on digital services means that the time to address issues and fulfill expectations is immediate and urgent. xMatters’ recent survey found that 75% of IT professionals believe their organizations are equipped with the tools and processes to support the increased consumption of digital services. However, there is a very serious gap between the technical team’s expectations and the actual customer experience. More than half (54%) of consumers surveyed said they experienced an increase in application performance errors with the digital services or applications they’ve used during this stay-at-home period.
Data Point No. 2: Put greater focus on infrastructure security and privacy.
Security or privacy also continues to be a top concern for consumers using digital services. When the survey asked consumers what could dissuade them from continuing to use digital services, half said they would stop using a mobile application or website if it was slow to respond, and half said security or privacy concerns would stop them.
As offices begin to reopen and workplaces offer flexible working environments, some companies will have employees both at home and in the office. Business leaders need to put measures in place to ensure that their teams are operating in a reliable and secure infrastructure, no matter where they work.
Data Point No. 3: Future-proof your business now and prepare for future business interruptions
As the world comes together to overcome the most critical health-care crisis our generation has faced, we as technologists can modernize the practice of business continuity to be one of business resiliency. This is done by ensuring that the digital service supply chain is future-proof and fault-tolerant and meets the needs and expectations of consumers and employees across industries during the current work-from-home period and beyond. Enterprises must build in the necessary operational resilience to support new and existing digital service offerings.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has already told us to expect a second wave of COVID-19. This could mean a return to shelter-in-place mandates and with that, a sustained or increased reliance on digital services. With 90% of consumers taking advantage of new digital services or applications to do their jobs, IT leaders need to have solutions for this increased reliance on digital services and ensure that continuity plans are in place to manage future business interruptions.
Data Point No. 4: Keep up the drive to innovate.
With regard to digital service experiences, more than half (52%) of consumers reported that if the mobile app or website does not respond quickly, they would stop using it. In the age of digital transformation, maintaining quick response times and high availability is no longer enough. IT organizations must regularly develop and release new, innovative services to stay competitive and meet the demand for high-quality and cutting-edge digital customer experiences. Otherwise, customers will jump ship and move on to an alternative service.
Tech leaders have an important responsibility to make sure teams on the hook for maintaining a positive customer experience have visibility into the entire customer lifecycle, whether that’s continuous integration and deployment, application monitoring or incident response. DevOps toolchains, for example, can connect the most effective tools for developing, delivering and maintaining software that your organization depends on for your DevOps teams and SREs. This provides transparency and accountability to ensure reliable and impactful customer experiences.
Data Point No. 5: Invest in automation.
There is no doubt that this pandemic will have widespread and long-lasting implications because it has massively altered how we learn, work, communicate and consume. The world now depends on digital services to such a great extent that the people and technologies making them possible are more vital than ever. A report from McKinsey estimated that up to 45% of the tasks that humans currently perform at work could be automated. xMatters’ survey also found that nearly half (43%) of IT teams surveyed now need to learn new technologies in the realm of automation, orchestration and cloud.
Now is not the time to take shortcuts in building the technology framework you need to avoid toil, especially toil that can be easily automated away. Mundane tasks like code deployment, rollback and incident response can also be automated to help ease the stress on IT. The more you can automate the technologies that ensure that experience, the happier both your customers and IT team will be.
We’ll post questions based on these concepts in the chat. Join us Tuesday, April 13 at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern for this, the 97th monthly #eWEEKchat. Go here for CrowdChat information.
#eWEEKchat Tentative Schedule for 2021*
Jan. 12: What’s Up in Next-Gen Data Security
Feb. 9: Why Data Orchestration is Fast Replacing Batch Processing
March 9: What’s Next-Gen in Health-Care IT?|
April 13: The Home as Enterprise Branch
May 11: Next-Gen Networking Products & Services
June 8: Next-Gen VDI Hybrid Deployments
July 13: DevOps & Agile Development
Aug. 10: Trends in Project Management & Collaboration Tools
Sept. 14: Trends in Data Storage, Protection and Privacy
Oct. 12: DataOps: The Data Management Platform of the Future?
Nov. 9: New Tech to Expect for 2022
Dec. 14: Predixions and Wild Guesses for IT in 2022
*all topics subjects to change