In 2021, businesses will continue to turn to digital channels. The challenge: delivering a satisfactory user experience. Where to invest budgets and which technologies are the most innovative.
The current business environment is leading organisations to rethink their operational strategies in order to strengthen their resilience and better cope with any crisis.
This has changed many of the previous technological perspectives and adoptions. Today, the focus is on where to allocate the financial resources that will allow the company to continue to grow, and to be ever closer to its users.
Here are the most disruptive technologies that should be at the heart of any IT budget this year, presented by Atentus, a visibility management monitoring technologies and methodologies company.
UX: "the ultimate goal of a digital channel must be user satisfaction, therefore, investing in the design of the experience and in measuring and monitoring that experience is fundamental for proper management. Today there are UX specialists, but we also have a lot of literature and recommendations on how to choose the right design and how to implement it," says Alejandro Padilla, CEO of Atentus.
In addition, there are two complementary techniques for measuring UX, one is synthetic monitoring and the other is the census measurement of each user, known as traffic/audience. The first technique provides a very objective view of the quality with which the digital channel responds at all times, i.e. the UX experienced by users at different times. The second has the purpose of knowing the behaviour of users and thus being able to manage changes in experiential design.
The applications (the Software): The software is nowadays the least uniform or rather the most tailor-made component of an IT infrastructure. It is in applications that we realise what we imagine and also our worst IT nightmares.
"This is why it is here that we must invest in the clearest possible way, always considering that software and ICT infrastructure must talk to each other as a single system that gives life to the digital channel (or to the solution to be implemented). That is why it is advisable to approach software projects as a Dev&Op project. But for this we also have tools today to support the evolution, performance and management of the software: the so-called APM (Application Performance Management) tools that allow us to have a permanent debugging of the software and to identify in an agile way its drawbacks and the origin of its failures", adds the executive.
ICT infrastructure (servers, databases and networks): Adequate investment in ICT infrastructure must go hand in hand with the design of the software solution. Software and hardware must work as one system. Investing in infrastructure monitoring is undoubtedly a hygienic aspect, i.e., it is necessary to know how each component of the system works, therefore, it is an item that cannot be left to the will of the operation and administration of systems, it must be an area, a distinct human team dedicated to this task.
IT Security and Data Security: Nowadays we cannot design an IT project without the security considerations required to protect against malicious acts and avoid known vulnerabilities, it would even be negligent if knowing where there is a vulnerability, it is not addressed. The investment dilemma undoubtedly comes from the "budget", as a project is always designed to give returns and in that sense it is first required to work, then to be secure and evolve. But this is changing and it is good that this is the case, because digitalisation exposes us to new risks of much greater sophistication.
Management and monitoring centre: Proper management of digital channels requires a minimum of monitoring information, but monitoring and incident (or event) management should be handled by a different team than operations and/or systems administration, because although they are professionals with similar professional profiles, they have very different priorities and focuses.
"Often, monitoring areas are handled by systems or network professionals, which always results in reactive management, i.e. what we colloquially call attending the fire. For this reason, it is advisable to invest from the design and start of operations in a dedicated Monitoring and Event Management area to support the other areas and the analysis that management needs to make decisions," concludes Padilla.