Mike Hicks, Principal Solutions Analyst at Cisco ThousandEyes, tells us how customer and stakeholder experience continues to be massively reshaped by digitization and the Internet.
For the past two years, we’ve all been iterating on what the future of work looks like.
The outcome of this effort is an enormous lift-and-shift. For Business Continuity reasons, we re-platformed work from the office to the Internet.
The office still exists as a place of work, but work exists outside of it, too. Work is now wherever workers are: on-site, offsite or between locations. It is the era of hybrid work and the hybrid worker, and within that, the Internet is now central to all definitions and aspects of working life.
Specifically, the Internet impacts:
● Internal-facing operations: where the Internet is your new corporate network, As-a-Service is your new app stack and multi-cloud is your new data center.
● Employees: where digital experience is crucial to attracting and retaining talent. People are moving to companies that offer flexible and satisfying work. Those without sound digital systems will struggle to meet that need and face an imminent talent exodus as a result.
● The customer and stakeholder experience: where closer relationships and differentiation are forged by providing higher quality always-on services and digital experiences.
There’s a lot to unpack here and it’s important that we do. In other iterative processes, agile software development being the key one that comes to mind, teams undergo retrospectives at the end of each iteration where they “reflect on the past to improve the future.”
That sort of reflection hasn’t really felt possible for a lot of us iterating on the future of work. We’ve had to build the plane while flying it, and many of us haven’t been able to properly sit down and reflect on what it means to be dependent on the Internet for work, a network that sits beyond our ownership and control, and what we need to create holistic strategies around that.
We all need time to reflect in order to understand the key behavioral changes, innovations and technology additions that will be needed to do business in the new year.
Internal-facing operations
Under the new realities of remote work, the Internet is now effectively the enterprise backbone, which as a ‘best-effort’ transport can have significant yet unforeseen consequences for businesses.
With applications and IT infrastructure hosted in the cloud and corporate traffic running across the Internet, performance is crucial to maintaining or improving productivity.
The positives are that new productivity-enabling tools are easier to consume. They can be onboarded quickly and at the demand of users, assuming backend policies are flexible enough and controls secure enough to facilitate this.
The challenges are that the Internet is a shared infrastructure with no (meaningful) service level agreements.
Central visibility of expanding application environments and multi-cloud is critical; as is being able to locate bottlenecks and other, potential, single points of failure; and being able to quickly pinpoint the root cause of degradation or outages to important services like cloud-based authentication, CDNs and DNS, and have the diversity or redundancy to be able to route around it.
Diversification across the complete enterprise stack is needed. Operations need to be maintained no matter what kind of load or conditions are impacting the Internet. After all, you may not own the Internet, but you do own the digital experience of your customers and employees.
Employee experience
The Internet has dramatically reshaped employee experience, and particularly the expectations that employees have for the places they work.
This has flow-on effects for how talent is attracted and retained, and for productivity.
At a macro level, we see this manifesting in the Great Resignation, a mass exodus of staff chasing more flexible working conditions. It’s a challenge, but also a “great opportunity for organizations to transform in deep ways because there’s no going back to the rigid models and workplace hierarchies of the past.”
Change comes at an individual organizational level. Organizations can lean on an existing body of research and on maturity models to navigate the hybrid work space. Change will involve giving employees the technical capability and the flexibility to decide where they work from. It may involve offering to automate employees’ most basic or repeatable functions, to enable more time for higher-order tasks and innovative thinking.
Ultimately, it will involve listening to employees, finding out what they want, and giving it to them as best as possible. With digital skills in high demand, it is an employees’ market and retention is crucial. Giving existing employees the best digital experience possible will go a long way to keeping them.
Stakeholder experience
Customer and stakeholder – such as vendor and partner – experience continues to be massively reshaped by digitization and the Internet.
Organizations faced with the challenges of maintaining performance and productivity in an Internet-driven workplace may want to consider restructuring their partner and service provider relationships.
It’s not feasible or practical to manage all the parties involved in end-to-end service delivery. It can be a while before an outage being experienced by users is acknowledged or reflected in a provider’s service status; delays in recognizing a fault delays rectifying it as well.
Organizations should establish independent visibility into their end-to-end Internet-powered network to see issues form and escalate them, without having to rely on status updates from official channels.
More than that, they should pursue new models of service delivery – particularly service-level relationships – where providers take responsibility for the end-to-end experience, not just the uptime of a single service.
Meanwhile, customer needs are very similar to employees. They are setting a high – and rising – bar for what constitutes a good or competitive user experience. Their ‘Great Resignation’, if they’re unhappy, will be to stop doing business with you. That should be reason enough to understand their needs and the experience they get from your competition, and to adjust your online-powered services accordingly.
For all Internet-powered experiences – internal, employee, customer and other stakeholders – end-to-end Internet visibility and independent digital experience monitoring is crucial. This is one of the most significant lessons of last year, and the one that will position organizations best for the future.
