Considerations: Approaching Business Observability

Connecting business results to system performance depends on the relationship between your IT and business maturity

Digital Agility Levels

Two dimensions of maturity determine your digital agility

Your IT maturity determines how ready you are for implementing various parts of business observability.

Low: IT acts as a cost center, optimizing solutions for the lowest possible cost. Teams operate independently of the business, often making decisions that optimize IT services but may not work well for business needs.

Medium: IT is aligned to business units and can provide solutions that impact the top and bottom lines. IT teams work with each business unit separately, so enterprise inefficiencies are common.

High: IT is integrated with the business across the enterprise. For example, platform teams serve multiple business units and enterprise architecture teams set standards.

How much your business units leverage technology determines how much they impact system observability. This might also be considered a barometer for being a “digital-first” business.

Low: Uses technology for standard business tasks but still has many manual processes. Does not use technology to improve user experiences. May even consider it part of the “brand.” (E.g., “We shun technology to do business the old-fashioned way.”)

Medium: Parts of the business innovate with technology while others lag. Some have product owners who have mapped the value stream. Overall, you hit roadblocks when two parts of the business meet (e.g., personalized marketing but manual selling).

High: Sees itself as a “tech company” that just so happens to make money selling other goods or services. Technology is crucial to its success at the executive and board level, not just within selected business units.

Business Observability Considerations

Questions for each combination of IT and business tech maturity

	Low Business Tech	Medium Business Tech	High Business Tech
Low IT	Which IT systems can you start monitoring to get the ball rolling on your observability journey?	Which product owners are willing to map their value stream?	What outsourced tech innovation or shadow IT project can you integrate with business observability to bring some capability in-house?
Medium IT	Which business unit is most ready to collaborate on an observability pilot?	Which product owners have mapped their value stream and have hit roadblocks in managing it?	What observability platform is needed?
High IT	What platform can accelerate business observability across a wide range of business units all at once?	What is the best opportunity for enterprise-wide business observability?	Which of your existing business observability practices are the most innovative?