Much like its regional peers, the UAE recognises technology as the great differentiator.
AI analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, and a host of other empowering developments help enterprises compete in their markets and help nations compete on the world stage.
The UAE government’s dedication to the digital economy can be seen most recently in its establishment of a national Digital Economy Strategy, supported by a new council for Digital Economy.
The move is designed to double the contribution of the digital economy to GDP by 2032.
Private enterprises in the UAE have long been digital pioneers. Success stories are plentiful – for example, the ride and delivery app Careem, ‘cloud kitchen’ Kitopi, online marketplace noon, and food-delivery platforms such as Deliveroo and Talabat.
In addition, on-demand household-cleaning services are available through Helpling ME. Washmen does the same for laundry, and Fetchr covers door-to-door courier services.
All these businesses are UAE-based, and all are popular for their app experiences.
But while most UAE organisations understand that customer and employee experiences are paramount, there is a tendency to confuse user friendliness with user experience.
In other words, app designers too often focus on the look and feel of their product and its functionality, rather than the humdrum, backend performance.
While it is fair to say that form and function are what attract a user to an app, performance, if poor, can easily drive them away.
Easy to prioritise, tough to deliver
Performance, then, should be seen as just as integral to the delivery of flawless experiences as aesthetics and user options.
But just as would-be digital businesses come to this realisation, they discover that caring about performance is a lot more straightforward than delivering it.
First, the designers of experiences must cater to more digital channels than ever before. Then, they must factor in the hybrid IT environment and the impact of remote work on IT operations. Additionally, cloud and hybrid technologies add complexity to the IT stack.
Today’s technologists must address performance issues not only for their impact on customer satisfaction, but for their impact on the organisation’s ability to attract top talent.
This will be extremely relevant as the UAE implements its National Program for Coders, which seeks to attract 100,000 software professionals and create 1,000 digital businesses.
Labour markets are full of digitally savvy candidates who view digital experiences as critical to their ability to add value for their employer, and therefore progress in the organisation.
Digital experiences also govern an employee’s access to flexible work. A US-based report from Deloitte showed that organisations offering such positive employee experiences have 25 percent greater profitability, double the customer-satisfaction scores, better employee engagement, and more than 2.5 times the market performance of other companies who have failed to do so.
Those responsible for app performance are therefore beset on all sides by expectations for flawless digital experiences.
When performance issues crop up, the IT function must sift through mountains and lakes of data and alerts. They use disparate tools that do not interlock, and so provide very little potential for actionable insights.
And where collaboration of domain experts occurs, it can involve significant labour-hours to produce any useful results. To make matters worse, when data retrieval is incomplete, potential future issues or opportunities for improvement can be missed.
Enter ‘unified observability’
Among experts, the first step towards resolving performance issues is accepted as being visibility of the environment.
The critical ability to spot issues as they occur, and to understand their dependencies, will set IT teams on the road to delivering flawless experiences.
However, current observability solutions – even so-called ‘full-stack’ observability tools – can miss some telemetry and fail to sample data in a way that captures the scale and complexity of modern environments.
Many solutions gather only a few types of data and limit their scope to the alert itself, rather than providing contextual information about the event or events behind it.
What is needed is unified observability – the bringing together of data, insights, and actions across all domains and environments.
When IT has this level of control at their fingertips, admins and analysts can dial out complexity and data noise to quickly get to the root of performance issues and provide seamless digital experiences for employees and customers alike.
Unified observability combines network performance management (NPM), IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM), and digital experience management (DEM).
The high-fidelity view of digital experiences across the environment can then be fed into advanced AI and ML algorithms to deliver accurate and actionable insights.
Implemented correctly and the result is an environment where innovation is no longer stymied by having to take timeouts in pursuit of obscure logjams that may or may not be actionable with the tools currently available.
Driving the nation’s digital economy
Organisations across the UAE are in a race against time.
The UAE Cabinet has already announced its Digital Economy Strategy which aims to double the contribution of the digital economy to the UAE’s non-oil GDP from 11.7 percent to over 20 percent within the next decade.
To support this commendable government vision, UAE businesses must deliver flawless performance.
Moreover, they must do this before their competitors do because they know that customers who migrate to competitors because of poor experience rarely return; and those who encounter positive experiences are more easily retained.
This implies that the player with the best CX (and by statistical association, EX) wins and may remain on top for the foreseeable future.
In the years to come, that ‘winner’ will be the organisation in possession of the right telemetry, insights, and intelligent automation to shine a light on every transaction and allow its immediate enhancement.
‘Unified observability’ is the name given to this enviable capability, and the future stars of the UAE’s ongoing success story will be talking about it often.
Ramzi Bsaibes, Senior Manager, the Gulf Region at Riverbed Technology
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