Earlier today at Cisco Live US, we saw results of a recent AppDynamics pulse survey that suggests a radical shift in the priorities technologists are facing in the wake of COVID-19.
In the survey, based on interviews of more than 1,000 IT professionals (from board-level through to mid-level management) globally and across multiple industries, 88% of respondents said that digital customer experience is now a top priority. Organizations are recognizing that now, more than ever, digital experiences are critical to their success.
But there’s another reality that’s worth underscoring: COVID-19 is putting technologists under tremendous pressure. The pandemic isn’t only changing priorities — it’s accelerating them. In fact, 74% of respondents said that digital transformation projects, usually months or years in the making, have been implemented within weeks.
The takeaway is clear: The global crisis is accelerating change within the digital landscape. And that brings us back to the importance of delivering and ensuring strong application experiences.
To do that, as I said earlier, we need to bring IT siloes together. AppDynamics and Cisco are already starting to bring this strategy to life through our joint solution with Intersight Workload Optimizer, which is designed to unlock connections across your teams and technologies to provide a single source of truth that spans from app to infrastructure, both on-prem and in the cloud.
However, it’s going to take a certain type of technologist to drive this strategy forward. And those are in relatively short supply.
The need for more Agents of Transformation
Now is an important opportunity to thank the IT heroes keeping our world connected through these turbulent times. Already, technologists are reporting that the response of their IT team to the pandemic has positively changed the perception of IT within their organization.
Yet there remains a need among technologists for the right tools, support, and environment to succeed. So, I want to also take this opportunity to call for action.
Back in November 2018, AppDynamics released a global study reporting that those we call “Agents of Transformation,” the elite technologists driving successful digital transformation, made up only 9% of the world’s technologists. The number was alarmingly small, but there was hope — 97% of technologists had the ambition and desire to digitally transform their organizations.
In the face of COVID-19, as we found in our most recent survey, the need for greater numbers of technologists to step up as Agents of Transformation hasn’t changed. What has dramatically changed is the urgency. Organizations need technologists to perform at the very highest level — not in the future, but right now — armed with the data and insight they need to deliver the positive business outcomes required at this time.
So, the call to action is this: Empower your technologists.
Organizations must now do all they can to provide their technologists with the tools, leadership, and support they need to accelerate their journey to become Agents of Transformation — because these are the people who make apps run in a multicloud, post-COVID-19 world.
Want to continue the conversation?
If you want to do this right — and if you’re anything like the many other technologists I’ve spoken with recently, who are wrestling with too many competing demands to distinguish the signal versus the noise — I invite you to learn from the playbooks of IT leaders who have already led their teams through massive change.
On Tuesday, June 23, we’re gathering a panel of these experts to dig deeper into changing IT priorities, how to accelerate digital transformation, and the skills and solutions technologists need to step up and drive business-critical projects. Sign up now to save your seat.
