Digital Workspaces and the Customer Experience

www.eginnovations.com 1
Customer Experience
Digital Workspaces and the
Customer Experience
How to connect the dots between
Customers, Business and Technology
Every layer, every component.
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The Digital Performance Management Company

Forward
eG Innovations has been helping customers answer the question, ‘Why is my application slow?’
for two decades. My relationship with the company started at that time, and until I became a
full-time employee more than 3 years ago, I had been--- and still am at heart--- an ITSM process
geek.
So, some of this rant is about process, IT transformation, ITSM and DevOps. But my journey to
service management excellence has been inextricably linked to monitoring; specifically,
technology monitoring. Since today’s business processes are largely digital, my continued
preoccupation with process is not really off-base--- even for a ‘monitoring’ geek.
In fact, the attraction to a process-perspective of business capabilities --- how things work ---is
so compelling that many organizations will be consumed by its applicability to the customer
experience. But the fact remains that all of your efforts in process improvement, UX and UI
design will be wasted if site/application performance is poor.
Providing end-to-end visibility – from users to servers to networks and storage – gives
organizations a 360-degree view of complex, heterogeneous ecosystems. This single pane of
glass view allows enterprise IT teams to collaborate easily and solve user-visible problems. The
total performance visibility also allows IT architects to determine how to right-size and optimize
their IT infrastructures for maximum ROI.
Technology monitoring in today’s enterprises is increasingly difficult and costly, and my hope is
that anyone taking the time to read this document will get at least some benefit and
perspective on how monitoring--- and unified monitoring in particular--- can be an important
and valuable lever for driving cultural change and keeping your technology investments focused
on what matters:
The consumers of your business’ digital services.
A road map to unified monitoring is a wicked problem. While technology monitoring is
inherently technical, it is not the technology that derails most efforts at unified monitoring.
People are much more likely to be the biggest challenge you’ll face.
And even though we say, ‘Unified Monitoring ’ or ‘Universal Monitoring’ , don’t think that you’ll
someday be able to standardize on a single monitor. Almost all enterprises will have a portfolio
of monitoring tools. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t want to optimize your portfolio --
- of course you do!
And therein lies the rub. Balancing a portfolio of monitoring tools is as much a people challenge
as it is a technology one. It’s an integral part of any digital transformation and a challenge
worth addressing.

The digital experience has become the basis of competition in the new world, and unless you
can connect the dots between your consumers, your business and the underlying technologies
you may find yourself and your organization in turbulent waters.
Digital transformation today is like watching a river flow--- but in this case
you’re in the middle of the rapids. Unified monitoring can help make sure
everyone’s rowing in the same direction.
The digital workspace is a critical foundation for effectively navigating your transformation to
the digital world. As trends like work from home (WFH) accelerate, getting a handle on
managing the capacity and performance of your digital workspace is a logical starting point
towards unified monitoring.
But don’t stop there. The same benefits of total performance visibility of a digital workspace
can be applied to any digital business service.
It’s time to take the plunge and get started.
I’ve referenced many other authors and excellent guidance I’ve found along the way and have
listed these in the book. My thanks to them for sharing and I hope that in some small way I’ve
been able to reciprocate.
About eG Innovations
eG Innovations provides the world's leading enterprise-class performance management solution that enables
organizations to reliably deliver mission-critical business services across complex cloud, virtual, and physical IT
environments. Where traditional monitoring tools often fail to provide insight into the performance drivers of
business services and user experience, eG Innovations provides total performance visibility across every layer and
every tier of the IT infrastructure that supports the business service chain. From desktops to applications, from
servers to network and storage, eG Innovations helps companies proactively discover, instantly diagnose, and
rapidly resolve even the most challenging performance and user experience issues.
eG Innovations' award-winning solutions are trusted by the world's most demanding companies to ensure end
user productivity, deliver return on transformational IT investments, and keep business services up and running.
Customers include 20th Century Fox, Allscripts, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Aviva, AXA, Biogen, Cox
Communications, Denver Health, eBay, JP Morgan Chase, PayPal, Southern California Edison, Samsung, and many
more.
John Worthington, Director Customer Success
John.worthington@eginnovations.com
linkedin.com/in/johnmworthington

Table of Contents
FORWARD.............................................................................................................................2
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ........................................................................................................6
SLA CHALLENGES ...................................................................................................................7
TOMORROW’S ALWAYS A DAY AWAY....................................................................................8
UNIVERSAL VS UNIFIED MONITORING..................................................................................10
DIGITAL WORKSPACES AND THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ....................................................12
PROCESSES, SERVICES AND VALUE FLOWS ...........................................................................13
PROCESSES AND WORKSTREAMS ..................................................................................................13
CUSTOMERS AND VALUE ............................................................................................................15
SERVICES AND SERVICE MANAGEMENT...........................................................................................17
FLOW AND IT OPERATING MODEL PERSPECTIVES..............................................................................18
FUGLE INNOVATION MODEL................................................................................................................. 18
DEVOPS (PEOPLE).............................................................................................................................. 19
ITSM (IT PROCESS) ........................................................................................................................... 21
IT4IT REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE (TOOLS/TECHNOLOGY).......................................................................... 21
OPERATING MODELS AND CO-CREATION................................................................................................ 22
PROCESS IMPROVEMENT AND THE DIGITAL WORKSPACE.....................................................23
CONNECTING THE DOTS.......................................................................................................24
THE BUSINESS CAPABILITY ICEBERG ...............................................................................................24
SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER OUTCOMES & MOMENTS OF TRUTH .................................................................... 24
BUSINESS CAPABILITY AREAS................................................................................................................ 25
MEASUREMENT FRAMEWORKS ............................................................................................................. 25
BUSINESS PROCESS & DIGITAL SERVICES PERSPECTIVES ............................................................................. 26
DIGITAL PERFORMANCE MONITORING ................................................................................27
REAL & SYNTHETIC USER MONITORING..........................................................................................27
BUSINESS TRANSACTION MONITORING ..........................................................................................28

APPLICATION & INFRASTRUCTURE MONITORING ..............................................................................28
ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS AND THE CLOUD ....................................................................................29
CONNECTING THE DOTS WITH CONVERGED APM/IPM......................................................................30
THE DIGITAL WORKSPACE AS A STARTING POINT ..............................................................................30
DIGITAL PERFORMANCE AND UNIFIED MONITORING..........................................................................31
NEXT STEPS .........................................................................................................................31

Customer Experience
Have you ever been Experienced?
i
“Different IT tribes will want to measure QoE for
different reasons. Many want to be warned of a
storm brewing and be well prepared to explain why
their tribe is not the source of the problem (or fix it
before they call). I call this the "it's the other
bastard’s fault" motivator.
QoE decisions, like many technology investments,
can be tribally driven. This is particularly true if the
organization has not invested in the time to
understand and define 'what is a service' and
performed some due diligence in analyzing
[business] processes.
Some IT tribes will display true leadership and go
beyond their comfort zones by incorporating other
technical silos into the equation, but I suspect this is
going to be difficult for many.
Taking an approach driven by best practices can
help avoid experiencing the angst associated with
knowing with absolute certainty where the problem
isn't, but not knowing where the problem is.
- MyServiceMonitor, 2008
While there’s a fever pitch around
customer experience today, this is not
really a new topic.
Customer experience emerged out of
telecom; Quality of Experience (QoE)
measured the delight or annoyance’ of a
customer’s experience with a service.
Today, the customer experience
movement is driven by digital
transformation and goes far beyond just
‘the network’.
The Experience Level Agreements (XLAs)
we hear about today attempt to connect
technical performance with customer
perceptions across all IT transactions and
interactions.
Experience Indicators should be
anchored to the wants and needs of your
customers (i.e., what makes them
happy?)
With everything –as-a-service in the
digital world, the number of service level
agreements (SLAs) and associated key
performance indicators (KPIs) has
increased exponentially.
Connecting the dots between your
customers, the business and
technology has never been more
difficult than it is today.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/have-you-ever-been-experienced-revisited-john-worthington/
Experience is how a customer
feels or their opinion at a given
time but more importantly,
over time. (CitrusCollab, n.d.)

SLA Challenges
D I g I t a l T o u c h P o I n t s
SLAs | KPIs | Metrics
Why is my application slow?
To consumers,
there’s no
satisfactory
excuse for a poor
digital experience.
- Harvard Business Review; What a Great Digital
Customer Experience Actually Looks Like
When it comes to the digital journey,
consumers expect things to just work.
But underneath all the digital touch
points that a customer encounters is a
dizzying array of metrics.
As everything becomes a service, the
number of key performance indicators
associated with each of these services
explodes. Since the customer experience
depends on the coordinated functioning
of all of these, managing digital
performance has become a huge
problem.
While outsourcing some or all services to
a cloud provider--- or multiple cloud
providers --- can reduce your
maintenance burden, the reality is it can
make performance management even
more difficult.

Tomorrow’s Always a Day Away
The appeal of ‘autonomous operations’--- NoOps--- isn’t really too surprising is it? IT operations
has always seemed to be in the basement of IT to me. Customers complaining, things breaking
and living inside a cost center has never been a picnic.
But the quixotic quest for ‘NoOps’ is just that. We’d be better off embracing operations than
attempting to avoid it, and this is largely what is happening today in spite of the term ‘NoOps’.
Attempting to get rid of operations misses an important point. Since businesses will forever be
under constant pressure to change, operations must be embedded in everything we do.
At the time of this writing, the term AIOps is one of the hottest buzzwords in monitoring.
Gartner, who coined the term, defines AIOps as follows:
This is a fancy way of saying that emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data
and machine learning are being used to help monitoring do what it’s always tried to do---
Detect events, make sense of them and determine the appropriate control action.
While there is debate about ‘domain-centric’ vs ‘domain-agnostic’ approaches, a simple way to
evaluate a monitoring solution is to simply see how it can meet monitoring’s basic goal based
on a specific target ecosystem or digital service.
Keep this thought in mind; if the target of your monitoring does not map to the consumers of
your digital service, it’s time to re-think the target. The vast majority of IT monitoring purchases
are for technology stacks--- servers, networking devices, applications, etc.
Domain-centric approaches tend to go deep into a specific technology. Domain-agnostic
approaches collect information from other (domain-specific) toolsets and make sense of events
by aggregating data across a portfolio of monitoring tools.
Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) is an umbrella term for the use of big data
analytics, machine learning (ML) and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to
automate the identification and resolution of common information technology (IT) issues.
-Gartner
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tomorrows-always-day-away-john-worthington/

While there’s no rule that says these approaches are mutually exclusive, it does present
challenges for customers looking to optimize their investments in a portfolio of monitoring
tools.
Organizations come in different sizes, with different levels of maturity and different application
portfolios. There is absolutely no doubt that advances in machine learning, artificial intelligence
and big data can be successfully leveraged to advance the state of the art in monitoring.
Twenty years ago, eG Innovations announced a dynamic baselining capability where the
monitor learns the norms of all measurements (so we know at 8AM on a Monday morning what
the CPU utilization of server ‘x’ should be) --- this leveraged what we know today as machine
learning. What we referred to as ‘root-cause analysis’ and ‘rules-free correlation’ twenty years
ago goes by artificial intelligence and ‘causation analysis’ today.
A unique aspect of the eG Enterprise architecture has been its ability to adapt to changes in the
technology landscape as shown below.
Remember, tomorrow’s always a day away. You must manage the digital user experience right
now--- it is the basis of other transformative changes you’re trying to achieve.
Unified monitoring has the potential to provide a level of transparency that is desperately
needed in many organizations, and the digital workspace is an excellent place to begin.

Universal vs Unified Monitoring
What’s the difference?
When eG Innovations announced their
Universal Monitoring technology more
than two decades ago, the ability to have
the same agent deployed irrespective of
the operating system or applications to
be monitored was unique.
The same eG agent deployed on a server
monitors the server hardware, operating
system and all of the applications running
on it. The agent monitor function is
universal in the sense that the same
license can be used to deploy an agent,
allowing unparalleled deployment
flexibility for IT managers. The Universal
Agent can be deployed on gold images or
remotely and rapidly pushed to target
systems using any software deployment
tool.
Since the agents are instructed by the eG
Manager to perform tasks, they can use
whatever method is called for--- SNMP,
Perfmon, queries, APIs, and so on. The
Universal Agents can be deployed
remotely as a data collector or directly
on a device such as a server. Today we
might call these agents ‘bots’.
Universal Monitoring is a
universal method of
collecting data --- agent-
based or agentless, active
or passive, and using
whatever data collection
mechanism is appropriate.
The value to the enterprise
is that it provides an
effective basis for
optimizing a portfolio of
monitoring tools.

IT has long been seeking a ‘single pane of
glass’. But approaches to achieving this
have varied wildly, from acquisition-based
approaches, aggregation-oriented or
analytics-based.
Acquisition-based approaches are just
that--- acquire a portfolio of monitoring
products and attempt to create a single
pane of glass by creating a single view to
all the underlying products. Of course, in
these approaches what’s behind the
curtain can often limit effectiveness. In
many cases, the single pane of glass is
cosmetic only--- there’s little real
integration under the hood.
Aggregation-oriented approaches
consolidate data but have left data
collection to others. These approaches
often don’t unify all aspects of
monitoring’s purpose (detect events, make
sense of them and determine the
appropriate control action). These
solutions may also limit opportunities to
optimize the portfolio, since they rely on
other monitors to collect data.
Analytics-based approaches are similar but
aggregate algorithms and seek to integrate
the analytics into the single pane of glass
vision. These solutions are emergent.
The cross-domain and cross-tier
visibility and automated diagnosis
capabilities of a true unified
monitoring solution enable a level
of organizational transparency that
is critical to IT transformation.
In fact, it is the key to a business case for
unified monitoring, and this is frequently
missed as organizations follow the flow
headlong down the digital river.
A true Unified Monitoring
solution is purpose-built with
the single pane of glass vision
and monitoring’s purpose in
mind.
It is no accident that eG
Innovations has been claiming
that it is no longer sufficient to
use a silo-based approach for
monitoring for over twenty
years--- unified monitoring is
what we’ve always done.

Digital Workspaces and the Customer Experience
The digital workspace has become a mission-critical foundation for digital success. Three basic
experience indicators for effective digital workspace performance include1
:
• Is it taking too long to log in?
• Have you experienced any errors?
• Have your applications and desktops been responsive?
Whether your digital workspace is based on Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, AWS or others, eG
Enterprise proactively addresses these through 4 key capabilities:
1. Measuring all aspects of the user experience though synthetic and real user monitoring
2. Monitoring every layer of every tier of the digital workspace ecosystem
3. Automatically correlating the cause of performance anomalies
4. Providing real-time and historical analytics for rightsizing and optimizing digital
workspace performance
Monitor all aspects
of user experience
Gain actionable
insights using
machine learning and
AIOps
Isolate the root cause
of issues
Forecast capacity
needs and right size
the infrastructure
Click the image for a short video
1 There are other aspects and indicators of managing the experience of a digital workspace as well. Security,
provisioning, administrative tasks, user interface elements, and other management areas are also important. The
next section takes a ‘deep dive’ into the process river.

Processes, Services and Value Flows
A Deep Dive into the Process River2
Processes and Workstreams
One of the White Papers I read that really helped me understand the ongoing frustration with
processes—business or IT processes—was The Difficult Process of Identifying Processes: Why It
Isn’t as Easy as It Sounds by Fred Nickols (Nickols, 2016).
What I liked about this paper was that it clarified for me that any process analysis must be
based on agreed process boundaries. It began a fascination for me about how different
stakeholders-- even when we appear to be agreeing on these boundaries--- can really be on
different pages.
What can also complicate how we view and understand processes is
the concept of process depth or level. The APQC Process Classification
Framework (PCF) helps by offering guidance in this area. Basically the
‘process river’ has different ‘depths’ of process as well.
These ‘depths’ of process boundaries are also important to having a
productive dialog about process improvement. Process frameworks
like ITIL and APQC’s PCF can help an organization with these
challenges.
Finally, another aspect of process is its adaptability to change.
Many streams of related activity are highly predictable and
repeatable. Others are more variable and unique. The promise
of Adaptive Case Management suggests that these streams of
related activity are literally created and acted upon by
knowledge workers as they work. While repetitive tasks have
traditionally been the targets of automation, technologies like AI
can rapidly adapt workstreams.
2 Apologies in advance for allowing me to turn the process geek in me loose. While process is very important,
nothing will de-rail a process improvement initiative quicker than a poor performing digital service. Remember, to
digital consumers, there’s no satisfactory excuse for a poor digital experience.
2
Picture yourself standing by the side of a shallow stream. In your
hands are two stakes. You wade out into the stream and drive
one stake into the bed of the stream. You say to yourself, "The
process starts (or ends) here."
Now, you wade downstream (or upstream) 50 feet or so and
drive the second stake into the bed of the stream, saying to
yourself, "The process ends (or starts) here."
You’re not fooled, are you? The process does not start nor end where you’ve driven the stakes into the streambed. At best, you have
marked a portion of the stream for study or manipulation or some other purpose. The same is true when you "drive stakes" into the
streambed of organizational activity as a way of defining business processes.
Process stream

Adding to the complexity of process analysis is the fact that these streams of related activity
involve people, and people work at different places on the ‘river’, at different depths and will
have different opinions on what can (and should) be ‘standard process’ versus which should be
‘adapted’.
So anchoring process analysis is of primary importance, and the customer is the best anchor!
A variety of methodologies are available for business process improvement. These include Six
Sigma, Lean Management, Lean Six Sigma, Agile Management, Re-engineering, Total Quality
Management and many others. One in particular is the Customer Expectation Management
Method (CEMM), by Terry Schurter.
CEMM’s concepts such as Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO), Break Points (BP), Business
Rules (BR) and Moments of Truth (MOT) leverage many proven techniques from the TQM
movement.
In this example, the red indicates moments of truth (MOT)
which is anywhere the customer touches the business
process or the business process touches the customer.
These ‘level 1’ processes are usually very closely aligned to
business capabilities and are at higher levels of the process
classification framework.
The customer journey mapping and value stream mapping
popular today capture these flows--- which could represent
a customer journey (service) or a segment of the ‘process river’.
More than a decade ago, in an attempt to find a business lane for customer’s ITSM road maps I
tried to use CEMM in concert with ITIL improvement initiatives. Not surprisingly, it met with
limited success since the stakeholders involved in ITIL were totally focused on IT-based process
improvement, in spite of ITIL’s claim to focus on services and value delivery to customers. In
many cases the ‘customer’ we anchored improvements to were within the IT department itself!
Today’s focus on managing the customer experience is a logical outcome of CEMM and outside-
in thinking, fueled by years of service management, more recently the DevOps movement and
advances in technology. CEMM uses a business process approach that leverages many proven
process improvement techniques.
In fact, methodologies like CEMM may be more relevant today than ever.
...anchor your analysis of a business process to something or someone, preferably to a tangible product or, better yet, to the customer - (Nickols)
FLOW

With the pervasive nature of technology in today’s business processes, the digital reality is
finally forcing the business to view IT as important a capability as Finance, HR and other
traditional business areas. The question becomes, what will IT do with this newfound leadership
role?
Customers and Value
An important quote in the Nickols’ White Paper was from Peter
Drucker:
Results, as Peter Drucker points out, are always outside an organization
What this means is that MONEY originates with the external
customers of the business. No amount of cost-cutting, process
efficiencies or elimination of waste will compensate for a lack of customers.
What does it mean to be customer-focused? It means that all improvement efforts can be
directly or indirectly linked to the external customers of the business. This directly impacts ITSM
(and DevOps).
A ‘systems view’ of process comes with risk; commonly known as ‘inside-out’ thinking. It is
interesting that the new ITILv4 guidance seems to acknowledge this by its reference to the
‘dimensions’ of service management and a much greater focus on external
customers/consumers.
“The great shortcoming of the input-process-output paradigm
is that it leads to a focus on the internal workings of a system
so intense that the external world is sometimes ignored or
overlooked. Yet, the external world is a vital factor in the
performance of all systems. The relationship between an
organization and its external world is characterized by
transactions – by the exchange of outputs for inputs.”
(see Figure 1 – The Difficult Process of Identifying Processes, (Nickols).
From: a Seat at the Table - Mark Schwartz
(Schwartz, 2017)

“ITIL 4 recommends that organizations map the activity
involved in delivering their products and services as service
value streams—the paths of activity required to create value
for the customer.
The four dimensions prompt people to look beyond the
traditional IT perspective of technology to consider the
broader service ecosystem—all the moving parts which
combine to create value for the customer.”
(AXELOS)
IT service management has always been
about building an organizational
capability focused on leveraging
technology to accelerate and increase
value delivery to customers.
Other approaches to service
management such as VeriSMTM
have also
recognized this reality and emphasize
that all of an organization’s capabilities can be leveraged when designing and delivering digital
services.
“VeriSM™ is a service management approach for the
digital age that helps service providers to create a flexible
operating model to meet desired business outcomes.
VeriSM™ supports organizations to succeed in the world
of digital services, using all organizational capabilities,
from IT to Marketing and Finance to Customer Service, in
order to deliver value.”
(Clair Agutter, 2017)

Services and Service Management
In the post, Process vs Service: What's the difference? I summarized information from another
post that outlined important similarities between processes and services. What struck me most
was the quote
‘process and service are two complimentary views on the same capability of an organization’
(check the post for details). (Roseman, 2010)
Look at ITIL’s evolution of the definition of an IT service:
ITIL v3 “A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want
to achieve, but without the ownership of specific costs and risks.”
ITIL v4 “A means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve,
without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks.”
In either case, a service is a means of delivering or creating value for customers. But since a
process can be any stream of related activity, there could be processes--- particularly at lower
levels--- that do not directly connect to customers. Does this mean the process is ‘waste’?
Similarly, cloud providers are creating ‘services’ that deliver value but the connection to the
customer is indirect at best. For example, the primary customer of IaaS services is often the IT
portion of the enterprise. Does this mean the service is ‘waste’?
So how can we connect the dots between customers, the business and IT? The original efforts
associated with Total Quality Management (TQM) dates back to more than 50 years ago (i.e.
Sherwart, Deming, etc.) and ultimately led to business process management (BPM) in the late
1990’s.
But for IT, even after two decades of defining services, we still wrestle with ‘what is a service’?
With the gold rush to the cloud we can have anything as a service (XaaS), and this can lead IT
right back into their traditional comfort zone--- an inside-out view of a system (service) so
intense we lose sight of its purpose (a means of creating/delivering value to external
customers).
It is also critically important that IT recognize that just as TQM led to a variety of methods and
techniques--- all of which can be applied in continuous improvement--- movements like DevOps
and frameworks like ITIL are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, all of these have become part of a continuous improvement tool kit and we need to
share what works (and when) with each other now more than ever. Both the ITIL©
v4 and
VeriSM™ guidance make that clear.
In a world full of shiny new objects, we need to stay focused on what works and most
importantly--- on the customer.

Flow and IT Operating Model Perspectives
Fugle Innovation Model
It’s important to recognize an initial driver of the DevOps movement. As businesses seek to
identify business process/service improvements--- many driven by technology enablers --- a
logical outcome was a desire for IT to deliver value to customers faster.
The Fugle Innovation Model (Du Preez & Louw, 2008) is based on a generic innovation process
and has a ‘funnel’ on one end and a ‘bugle’ on the other. Ideas enter the funnel on one end and
are exploited on the bugle end. The business wants the ‘Ah Ha!’ moments to be accelerated to
‘Ka Ching!’3
moments as quickly as possible.
This is basically what accelerated flow is about.
So, IT now sits as a fundamental business capability just like Finance, Sales, HR, and so on. The
ability to deliver value to the external customers of the business depends on these capabilities,
so regardless of whether we take a ‘white box view’ (i.e., process view) or a ‘black box view’
(i.e., service view), value delivery will involve multiple business capability areas and be impacted
by external factors such as suppliers, regulatory, technology, etc.
3 I could not find the originator of this; my best guess is Patrick Debois

What’s sometimes missed is that improvements at lower levels of processes and/or services
can also have an impact on customer experience. When customers are directly touching the
process/service (i.e., moments of truth) the impacts are easy to see.
But improvements--- particularly at lower levels of processes/services--- can and do also
happen in the ‘refinement’ stage of the innovation model.
The emergence of the Agile Manifesto led to the acceleration of software development, which
led to a desire to accelerate delivery (i.e., Dev to Ops) but today we seek to extend this all the
way through the IT service ‘value chain(s)’—from ideation all the way to exploitation.
With the DevOps movement becoming ‘mainstream’, more efforts are being made to automate
all aspects of IT delivery and the focus on accelerating FLOW (Ah Ha! To Ka Ching!) continues to
increase exponentially.
But lessons of the past have taught us that simply automating a bad process will not lead to
success; relentless focus on the digital user experience will be key to success in the digital age,
and ‘connecting the dots’ between the customer, the business and technology as the digital
age accelerates is more important than ever.
DevOps (People)
The acceleration of FLOW (Ah Ha! To Ka Ching!) benefits both the business and customers; the
customers get value and the business makes money. So ITSM, DevOps and architectures like
the IT4IT Reference Architecture all focus on ‘streams of related activities’.
From a DevOps perspective flow centers on accelerating the movement of work through a
continuous delivery pipeline. While this involves people, process and tools DevOps started as a
movement and is highly focused on driving the cultural changes required to make this a reality.

As DevOps moves from left to right the number and perspective of different stakeholders’
changes, sometimes dramatically. This is putting pressure on traditional silo-based
organizational structures. Organizations are increasingly creating cross-functional teams, and
these teams should be aligned to customer outcomes.
In fact, the book Team Topologies suggests the creation of ‘stream-aligned’
teams. Combining the team topologies approach with unified monitoring
can help avoid the effects of Conway’s Law and provide clear guidance on
how teams should communicate.
“...increased collaboration is not always the same as increased communication.”
- Skelton, Matthew. Team Topologies (Kindle Locations 3273-3274). IT Revolution Press. Kindle Edition.
For example, team 1 may be a platform-aligned team and other teams view the platform as a
‘service’, such as a digital workspace. Teams 2 and 3 may be aligned to different application
ecosystems or microservices.
While stream-aligned teams can be effective as outlined in Team Topologies they still need to
remain aligned to customer outcomes, and this excellent book provides organizations with
suggestions on what has worked for other enterprises.
What’s important is that the inter-team communication remain aligned to customer
outcomes--- the value stream and/or digital journey.
In any case, IT processes and services run wide, deep and change rapidly. Organizations need
to take a 360° view of user experience and make it a central component of their IT monitoring
strategy. All teams need total performance visibility to navigate todays’ digital river!
Infrastructure
(i.e., Digital Workspace)
Application Ecosystem 1
Application Ecosystem 2

ITSM (IT Process)
While DevOps focuses on accelerating overall flow, as we
move down the process hierarchy (deeper in the process
‘river’), actual activities and tasks are engaged. These streams
of activity rely on core ITSM processes and practices, which
are adapted based on the needs of each organization.
For example, the flow in RED may represent an Incident and
the flow in BLUE may represent a Request for a new feature.
There may be many different flows, some automated (repeatable) and others that are adapted
based on real time circumstances.
Guidance such as ITIL© and VeriSM™ provide a wealth of information customers can use to
establish and increase process capability and maturity associated with IT practices.
IT4IT Reference Architecture (Tools/Technology)
IT4IT is a reference architecture that focuses on the information needed to manage IT and the
flow of data between IT management systems. Like DevOps and ITIL v4, it segments the
activities into logical streams of work.
Guidance Workstreams
DevOps: Agile, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment
ITIL v4: Engage, Obtain/Build, Design & Transition, Delivery & Support, Plan &
Improve
IT4IT: Strategy to Portfolio, Requirements to Deploy, Request to Fulfill, Detect to
Correct
Since IT4IT focuses on data flow, it identifies where the ‘depth’ of process analysis becomes
vendor or tool-specific (activities and tasks). Each segment of the overall IT value chain can be

analyzed, at different depths of process--- value streams (i.e., Detect-to-Correct) and process
groups (i.e., Deliver & Support) or at a specific process level (i.e., Incident Management).
DevOps, ITIL, IT4IT and VeriSM all describe IT work streams and flow.
Operating Models and Co-Creation
The relentless drive to co-create value with customers accelerates change at every level of an IT
operating model. People are forming ‘stream-aligned’ teams, Processes are constantly being
optimized (at every level of the ‘process river’), and Tools are being swapped in and out based
on team needs.
This has significant impacts on technology monitoring, since it is a broad-based activity that
triggers many different processes and increasingly touches virtually every area of the
customer value stream. Whether this ‘touch point’ is direct (as in a customer’s use of mobile
technology) or indirect (such as using a cloud service), misses the point.
Unless you connect the dots across and at every level, it’s easy to create customer chaos
instead of customer value.

Process Improvement and the Digital Workspace
The allure of AI and automation is so compelling
that it can totally consume an organization’s
focus.
But nothing will de-rail a process
improvement initiative quicker than a poor
performing digital service. Remember, to
digital consumers, there’s no satisfactory
excuse for a poor digital experience.
The costs of a poorly performing digital
workspace are often hidden. Improvements
that might happen at lower levels of
processes and/or services do not materialize
when employees are busy in war room
meetings or wrestling with poorly performing
services.
This not only has an impact on customer experience, it can stifle where real improvements
often originate--- at lower levels of processes/services (and organizations).
So, while process improvement is important and ongoing, establishing and maintaining a digital
workspace that ‘just works’ is a foundation for future improvement.
Monitoring the performance of your digital workspace with eG Enterprise can be a good first
step in a unified monitoring road map.
In about 60 percent of occupations, at
least one-third of the activities that
make up a specific job could be
automated. - McKinsey

Connecting the Dots
Once you’ve established a secure, well designed and consistently performing digital workspace
employees can really focus on the customers that really matter--- the external customers of the
business.
What often happens as a result of implementing eG Enterprise for monitoring the digital
workspace is that organizational capabilities around performance management are also
enhanced or developed.
So, the organization is prepared to expand the customer experience journey or enhance an
existing journey.
The Business Capability Iceberg
If you put customers at the top of your priority list--- and in the digital age you’d better --- then
you begin to see how removed the underlying technology can be from customers. While a
consumer may use a device like an iPhone every day, there’s an unbelievable array of
technology that must work in harmony to deliver a successful customer outcome. The vast
majority of this technology is invisible to the consumer.
Unless something doesn’t work.
Successful Customer Outcomes & Moments of Truth
Companies have been using outside-in techniques4
for many years. Successful Customer
Outcomes (SCO) apply to processes covering a complete interaction with a customer, and to be
successful the outcome must make the customer’s life simpler and easier5
. The Moments of
Truth (MOT) are anywhere the customer touches the business process or the business process
touches the customer.
This is one way to measure the customer journey and represents the business value stream
from the eyes of the customer. This sits on the top of the business capability iceberg.
4 outside–in development focuses on satisfying the needs of stakeholders. The underlying theory is that to create successful software, the team
must have a clear understanding of the goals and motivations of the stakeholders. The ultimate goal is to produce software that is highly
consumable and meets or exceeds the needs of the intended client. (Wikipedia)
5 The Successful Customer Outcome Toolkit, v1 – www.ipapi.org

Business Capability Areas
Organizational capabilities define an organization’s identity and personality. They are critical to
differentiating a company from their competitors.
“...organizational capabilities, as we call them, are key intangible assets. You can’t see or touch them, yet they can
make all the difference in the world when it comes to market value.
These capabilities—the collective skills, abilities, and expertise of an organization—are the outcome of investments
in staffing, training, compensation, communication, and other human resources areas. They represent the ways that
people and resources are brought together to accomplish work.” – Harvard Business Review, Capitalizing on Capabilities6
While organizations create functional structures that group these capabilities into departments,
this is precisely why customer experience must sit at the top of the capability iceberg. Customer
outcomes almost always span multiple business areas, including IT.
The real question is, how do we connect the dots across what seems like an endless stream of
digital processes, services and the underlying technology?
Measurement Frameworks
There are a wide variety of approaches and methods that organizations use for decision
making, and when successfully implemented they:7
• focus the enterprise on what is important (desired behaviors and outcomes),
• link strategy and tactics,
• help assess performance against a baseline,
• provide feedback that guides change, and
• supply support for business cases.
One very common measurement framework is the balanced scorecard. Even after more than
two decades this guidance remains a proven, flexible, adaptable, management framework.
6
https://hbr.org/2004/06/capitalizing-on-capabilities
7
APQC; Measurement Frameworks https://www.apqc.org/sites/default/files/files/Measurement%20Frameworks.pdf

“I still find The Balanced Scorecard a powerful methodology to develop strategic initiatives, KPIs
and metrics.8
”
The reason for its popularity lies in the word ‘balance’. Organizations must address all areas of
the balanced scorecard in order to continually build organizational capabilities.
Business Process & Digital Services Perspectives
As stated earlier, process and service are two complimentary views on the same capability of
an organization. Both must be aligned to successful customer outcomes, and both depend on
the capabilities of the business. For this reason and others, process and service improvement
efforts should be closely aligned.
The levels of processes and services we are measuring are critical to connecting the dots
between customers, business processes and technology. The flows running through your digital
river will span different capability areas (i.e., business units, suppliers, etc.) and technology
domains (applications, infrastructure, etc.).
This is the challenge associated with the business capability iceberg. Analyzing and accelerating
‘FLOW’ across different streams of related activity in an enterprise will require monitoring
across all of these measurement areas--- every one of these key performance indicators (KPIs),
metrics and measurements must be connected to the top of the iceberg, whether you happen
to be travelling through an eddy, a riffle or a rapid.
And the best way to do this is by starting with end users.
8 Dragon, Dave. I Solve Mysteries: The Art and Science of Business Process Optimization and Transformation . Silver Tree Publishing. Kindle
Edition.

Digital Performance Monitoring
Connecting the Dots with Converged APM/IPM
Top-down, outside-in--- regardless of the buzzwords the customer is king in the digital age. So,
it only makes sense that before we get lost in the monitoring weeds we start with what
matters; End Users.
While you may have requirements to monitor specific technologies or platforms, always start
your discussion with how these technologies and/or platforms connect to end users.
Real & Synthetic User Monitoring
Insights into the performance and stability of websites and web
applications are essential to retain customers and grow your
business. Traditional data center-centric views of IT
performance do not provide the complete picture of actual user
experience.
While these can provide high-level uptime/downtime analytics,
they lack actionable insights of real user experience and service
slowdown, a critical need for IT managers to preemptively
detect and resolve issues.
The enterprise needs complete visibility into the real user
experience by monitoring every user, anytime, from anywhere, on any browser, from any
device. eG Enterprise uses an agentless approach to passively and continuously monitor end-
user experience in real time.
However, passive monitoring approaches are not effective when
users are not actively using the applications, or when
instrumentation is not available (for example, legacy
applications and custom applications).
Synthetic monitoring approaches can actively and continuously test business transactions and
proactively identify performance problems before users are impacted.

Business Transaction Monitoring
Simulated and real user monitoring can also provide an ability to monitor the complete digital
journey taken by customers and identify which step (often a Moment of Truth) has failed or is
slow.
Business transaction tracing can also automatically trace user access from web browsers or
native mobile applications to the application server and pinpoint the server-side component
responsible for slow business transactions. This can accelerate testing in pre-production (Ah-
Hah! to Ka-Ching!) as well as improve production support.
Application & Infrastructure Monitoring
Without a truly unified and holistic view of all factors—across applications and the
infrastructure—that affect the user experience, you are effectively flying blind.
Today’s multi-tiered application architectures make it
difficult to manage performance. Due to complex inter-
dependencies between application tiers, the dynamic
nature of application rollouts, and deployment on
heterogeneous platforms (physical, virtual, and cloud
infrastructures), IT teams often spend hours trying to
determine the root cause of application slowdowns.
A modern application performance management
solution automates:
• Continuous tracking and measurement of end-
user experience on applications, websites and services via real and synthetic user
monitoring
• Analysis of business transactions (digital workflow) and determines if the issue is due to
the application code or not
• Analysis of the health of all the underlying infrastructure tiers to isolate the cause of
performance issues

Enterprise Applications and the Cloud
Enterprise applications like SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft
are business critical. Slow or poor performance of
these applications can result in revenue loss for
businesses, unhappy users and lost productivity.
Whether a public, private or hybrid cloud
infrastructure is used, holistic performance visibility is
required to ensure successful service delivery and
achieve high efficiency.
These applications and services typically have
multiple inter-dependent tiers, multiple domains of
control and shared workloads. Without visibility
across public, private and hybrid cloud ecosystems connecting the dots will be problematic at
best.
Modern applications are built on a microservices architecture with containers as the means for
deployment and operation of application components and Kubernetes as the platform for
orchestration, to automate and manage container provisioning. The performance of these
distributed and elastic applications depends on how the container orchestration is set up and
how resources are provisioned dynamically to support automatic scaling, based on business
need.
Customers need unified performance visibility into the Kubernetes orchestration environment,
the containers provisioned, and workloads running on them.
While most of these infrastructure components are
invisible to consumers, the ability to monitor all aspects of
your on-premises and cloud environments – across
servers, applications, virtualization, storage, containers,
and more--- is critical to assuring digital service
performance.
The enterprise must automatically discover dependencies,
track infrastructure changes, and auto-diagnose whether
slowdowns are originating due to an application code
error, network slowdown, database issue, storage
bottleneck, server misconfiguration, or virtualization
problem.
This suggests that intelligence and analytics will be critical enablers of effective technology
monitoring.

Connecting the Dots with Converged APM/IPM
Converged APM/IPM provides real-time and historical views of each customer’s digital journey
and can help you connect the dots between your experience indicators and the underlying
complexity associated with SLAs and KPIs.
Real-time dashboards showing user
locations, device types, user experience
indexes and other information quickly
identify when performance is degrading so
preventive actions can avoid user impact.
In addition, get pre-correlated views of user
history including each step along every layer
of every tier of every transaction if desired
and capture business context data as well.
This could include items added to a shopping
cart or any relevant other business context
information.
The Digital Workspace as a Starting Point
The digital workspace is rapidly becoming a foundation for many, if not all, digital services.
Regardless of whether your digital workspace is based on Citrix, VMware Horizon, Microsoft
RDS, AWS Workspaces or others, this technology framework provides a unified, contextual and
secure user experience.
These ecosystems also have multiple inter-dependent tiers and are often a good starting point
for beginning a journey towards unified monitoring. Understanding the various end users and
ecosystems that will be delivered over the workspace(s) is a critical first step along the
transformation path ---
always start your discussion with how these technologies and/or platforms connect to end
users.

Digital Performance and Unified Monitoring
The ability to converge end user, application and infrastructure monitoring provides total
performance visibility to an enterprise. While this can be accomplished using different
approaches, unified monitoring provides a mechanism to optimize a portfolio of monitoring
tools (over time!) as well as embed analytics and artificial intelligence to automate monitoring.
By collecting measurements at every layer of every component of a digital business service,
automatically learning the norms of all measurements, and using embedded analytics to
automatically isolate which layer of which component is the source of a performance issue
customers can effectively connect the dots from their end users to the complexity that lies
beneath the business capability iceberg.
eG Innovations has been on this path for two decades and can help customers create a road
map to unified monitoring that keeps them focused on customers.
Next Steps
For more information, please visit www.eginnovations.com/solutions/converged-application-
infrastructure-monitoring
Email us at info@eginnovations.com
WEBINAR REPLAY
Check out this 30-minute webinar which includes a few demonstrations
of these capabilities.
LIVE DEMO
Request a personal walkthrough to learn first-hand how eG Enterprise can help
you connect the dots between customers, business and technology.
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15 days of free monitoring and diagnosis, in your own infrastructure. Try it and
learn exactly how eG Enterprise helps you ensure a great user experience for
your end users.

Digital Workspaces and the Customer Experience

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