Business Leaders: New Survey Finds Digital Performance Gap and How to Overcome It

Digital and the delivery of digital services has become business critical. We see this across every industry, and in a new survey Riverbed conducted with 1,000 global business leaders, almost all were in agreement that implementing a digital strategy, maximizing its performance and doing it sooner, rather than later, is critical to their future success. In fact, the vast majority of respondents (91%) agreed that a successful digital experience is even more critical to the company’s bottom line than it was just three years ago.

Business leaders are aware of the benefits around digitization—including increased revenue, stronger brand perception and improved employee productivity. And while the resulting rush toward digital transformations will push markets to adopt new, innovative products and services, a significant digital performance gap exists. Nearly 80% of business leaders reported that critical digital services are failing at least a few times per month and impacting employee productivity and the end user experience.

And 95% of these same business decision makers say that major barriers—including budget constraints, legacy networks and lack of visibility into the digital experience—are holding them back from advancing digital strategies and delivering the performance and customer experience required in today’s digital world.

The performance of a digital service or tool—whether an online retail interface, digital health service or a mobile banking app—can define the end-user experience as either good or bad and any gap between its potential capabilities and its actual performance is critical to overall business success. The survey found that in order to maximize performance, companies need visibility into the full digital experience so they can monitor, measure and proactively address issues. Additionally, business leaders must ensure that they have a modern IT architecture in place to adequately support and capitalize on these new digital technologies.

In fact, 99% of business leaders say that visibility across the digital experience is critical to measure and manage it successfully; and 98% of global business decision makers believe that a modern, next-gen infrastructure that delivers greater agility is important to improving digital performance.

And business leaders are making it clear that the time to act is now. Among the respondents:

• 77% believe that it’s critical for their companies to invest in an improved digital experience for users or customers within the next 12 months
• with 95% adding that those who don’t act in the next 12 months believe they will face negative business consequences—such as a loss in sales and revenue, delayed product launches, loss of customers and brand loyalty, and a decrease in employee productivity.

Companies that are rolling out full digital strategies, including full visibility into their digital environments and next-gen infrastructure as a way of maximizing performance, will be the ones who set the stage for the next wave of technology and will reap the benefits of integrating emerging digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning into their solutions. They’re the ones that will disrupt markets, open new product categories and send the digital naysayers searching for relevance.

 By Subbu Iyer

Published with permission from Riverbed.