Maximising Your Digital Investments

How can technology leaders maximise their digital investments during a period of intense socio-economic and political flux?

When the pandemic hit, companies’ digital asset value chain shifted from business as usual to pandemic readiness. Digitisation has become the new normal, but that poses challenges too, for digital investments. From the pandemic, business leaders must now pivot back to pandemic readiness, setting in place the necessary processes, procedures and IT controls to continue leveraging digital assets for their strategic value. The pandemic has upended the ability of businesses to extract full ROI from digital assets.

To understand why, we must first understand the pandemic’s impact. The pandemic has also upended the way that businesses conduct their day-to-day operations. The ability to conduct business anywhere, at anytime and from almost any device has made the workday more flexible, efficient, and productive.

With Brigid Nzekwu moderating this roundtable, the speakers include:

• James Harvey, EMEAR & Transformation Director, CISCO Appdynamics
• Joanna Drake, CIO, THG
• Karl Hoods, CDIO, Beis
• Keith Baxter, Head of IT and Student Systems, Carlow College

Streamline Digital Investments

The pandemic has upended the ability of businesses to extract full ROI from digital investments and assets because of the issue of compliance. By identifying the gaps in a company’s current systems, addressing them and following a strict compliance plan to maintain control over the various business processes, companies can ensure that they have set in place all necessary processes, procedures, and IT controls to continue leveraging digital assets for their strategic value. Otherwise, if these issues are not addressed in time, businesses may not be able to assess their risk digitally in real time (e.g., when data breaches occur), as a result of not being able to detect cyber-attacks before they occur.

Maintain Operational Agility

Businesses must embrace change and digital transformation, while also maintaining operational agility. This can be achieved by understanding the impact of digital assets on a business’s operations and planning for disruptions. The pandemic has impacted businesses in a variety of ways. It has disrupted the way we work, what we work on, where we work and when we work. The pandemic has also upended traditional IT infrastructures as people shift to working from home or remote offices more often. As a result, traditional IT infrastructures are less reliable and resilient to disruption than before the pandemic. In order to maintain operational agility in light of these disruptions, it is important to have a plan for managing risks to a business’s operational stability due to interruptions caused by the pandemic. Digital investments have become an integral part of daily life – not just for personal communication but also for accessing information and conducting business-related tasks such as customer service inquiries, customer orders and finding content. Maintaining robust IT infrastructure will enable businesses to continue leveraging these digital assets strategically.

Boost Operational Resilience

As a result of the pandemic, companies must now pivot back to pandemic readiness, setting in place the necessary processes, procedures and IT controls to continue leveraging digital assets for their strategic value. The pandemic has upended the ability of businesses to extract full ROI from digital assets. In order to keep a business running efficiently and accessing digital assets during a pandemic event or other emergency, there is a key step to implement: - Prepare for the worst: studying a company's operational resilience needs and putting them into action will reinforce the system in place and highlight potential issues. This will help an organisation maintain operations during a crisis. The bottom line is that it is imperative to invest in digital investments today to pay off tomorrow by supporting an organisation's resilience requirements.

Businesses’ digital asset value chain

Digitisation has changed the way that business is conducted. Businesses have turned to digitising as a way to make their operations more efficient and productive. Digitisation is what has made it possible for people to do business from wherever they are at any given time. However, with digitisation comes the need to protect digital assets. This is where the pandemic’s impact comes into play. When it hit, businesses' digital asset value chain shifted from business as usual to pandemic readiness. Businesses had to focus on making sure that their digital assets were protected from the pandemic and then recover them when it passed. As such, businesses must now pivot back to pandemic readiness, setting in place the necessary processes, procedures, and IT controls to continue leveraging digital assets for their strategic value.

In a world where digital assets are becoming increasingly vital to every business, it is important to consider the ROI of digital investments. Traditional ROI metrics do not take into account the value of digital assets. It is necessary for businesses to consider these new measures of success when making decisions about which digital assets to invest in. Instead of considering the ROI on digital investments in traditional terms, it is important to evaluate them in new ways. For example, if you invest in a company’s digital assets, you may wish to measure how much more accessible the company becomes to potential customers and their buying habits. Another way to look at ROI on your digital investments is to see how much quicker it is for a business to recover after a disaster or outage. What is important is that by evaluating performance through these new lenses, businesses maximise their investment and potential ROI.

This roundtable was created in partnership with AppDynamics.