The Role of Service Delivery Infrastructure in Determining the Overall Digital Experience

Like it or not, your digital experience — that is the overall digital experience you provide for your customers — is largely what defines you nowadays. After all, technology provides the primary interface between most businesses and their customers.

And your service delivery infrastructure plays a massive role in determining the overall digital experience you provide for your customers. Such infrastructure works in tandem with applications in providing the critical business services your customers depend on.

That’s why it’s so essential that you effectively maintain your service delivery infrastructure and stay out front when it comes to updates, keeping the pace with innovation and anticipating and planning contingencies for possible events — before they occur.

Maintaining Predictability in Service Delivery Infrastructure

Predictability sounds boring in our everyday lives. But it’s absolutely key when it comes to your service delivery infrastructure. Predictable IT is what enables you to maintain the service you provide for your customers without interruption.

Regardless of your business vertical, your customers demand a technological interface they can depend on. If they don’t get it from you, they’ll eventually go elsewhere. And while predictability may be key to your service delivery infrastructure, what’s key to predictability is visibility.

Visibility means that your IT team has the ability to see events as they’re happening, as well as the capability to filter out the truly important signals from the background noise. This visibility is what enables your team to rapidly and proactively minimize mean time to know (MTTK) to identify the root cause of IT events.

Staying Ahead of the Wave

Maintaining your service delivery infrastructure is in many ways like trying to stay out in front of a wave without ever letting it all come crashing down on you. Having a seemingly endless stream of events can create a “tidal wave” of unqualified alerts from myriad sources.

With as many sources as we have now, there are only going to be more of them going forward. Already, your IT team may be getting alerts from elements of your critical business service infrastructure that likely includes:

• Millions of connected devices
• Mobility factors
• The increasing virtualization of everything
• Multi-cloud architecture
• Hyper-converged infrastructure
• Software defined data centers
• Security and data protection

The reason it’s important that you stay out in front of this wave is because you don’t want to put your IT team in a place where they’re forced to adapt a “fire-fighting” approach. That is, you don’t want be reactive, or slow to respond. So important is service delivery infrastructure in terms of the overall digital experience you provide, that you may need to rethink your approach to maintaining it.

Flawless Event Management

Maintaining your service delivery infrastructure properly necessitates moving towards a model of flawless event management. This type of event management is a departure from the old model of waiting for something to go wrong, summoning everyone into a war room and launching a witch hunt to try and find someone to pin the blame on.

Your service delivery infrastructure is one of the primary apparatuses you depend on to determine your overall digital experience. Rather than witch hunts and war rooms, flawless event management involves:

• Separating the signal from the noise
• Providing enriched, accurate incident information to Level 1 service desk
• Averaging a few seconds from original event to identifying root cause for a technician
• Directing specific incidents to the right person, depending on several configurable criteria
• Sending enriched root cause incidents northbound to 3rd-party ITSM tools, using field-proven integration to major platforms like ServiceNow and BMC Remedy to facilitate workflow-based routing

Making Service Delivery Infrastructure Predictable

In the end, it all boils down to predictability. As has been emphasized, your service delivery infrastructure plays the starring role when it comes to the overall digital experience you provide. And properly maintaining that infrastructure requires IT that’s predictable.

Predictability in terms of service delivery infrastructure requires confidence; confidence in your software, confidence in your service provider and confidence in the infrastructure itself.

A great digital experience involves more than just a good UX interface design and working application code. Your service delivery infrastructure is key in that it works in tandem with the application code to deliver the critical business services your customers rely on you to provide.

Maintaining your overall digital experience means ensuring that your IT team has the tools it needs to identify, verify and validate root cause incidents and provide a certainty with validation that will facilitate a successful first-time resolution.

When you trust that your service delivery infrastructure can be depended on to provide the right information to the right people at the right time, you’ll have the confidence of knowing that when events do occur, your team will be able identify and rectify those events before they disrupt the digital experience you provide for your customers.

Maintaining Service Delivery Infrastructure

Deploying service delivery infrastructure you can rely on is just the first step in safeguarding the digital experience you provide for your customers. Once you’ve deployed your platform, you must maintain it.

That means devising an effective means of keeping pace with the unstoppable evolution of technology across the stacks. One of the keys to this is to partner with a provider that makes it their business to onboard management for new technologies and to update existing management coverage in order to reflect current best practices as well as lessons learned from previous support experience.

Looking Forward

The overall digital experience you provide is already central to how customers view your business. With some estimating that as much as 85 percent of customer interfaces will soon occur through technology, the pressure on maintaining a seamless digital experience is only going to increase.

At the heart of that experience lies your service delivery infrastructure. That’s why it’s absolutely vital that you deploy and maintain it in a manner that ensures maximum visibility, reliability and of course, predictability.