The COVID-19 pandemic and an increasingly distributed workforce have prompted state and local government agencies to reevaluate how they use IT to support their mission, ushering in an era of accelerated digital transformation.
Many of these digital transformation initiatives, however, have fallen short of expectations or created unexpected challenges. This has led to employees being unequipped to unlock their full potential, resulting in high employee turnover and burnout rates.
On top of this, a recent SolarWinds® IT Trends Report found digital transformation — especially the acceleration of hybrid IT — has made IT administration more complicated. When surveyed, nearly 50% of public sector IT pros said implementing complex new tools and technologies has resulted in project delays and lower returns.
State and local IT leaders can, however, combat the complexity and burden of digital transformation.
Step Back and Evaluate What’s Happening on the Ground
In digital transformation, people are as pivotal as technology. But as agencies rushed to meet the demands of the pandemic, many bolted new capabilities onto existing systems, further complicating IT management and leading IT teams to question the value of transformation.
As agencies settle into a new normal, IT leadership must step back and evaluate how IT teams have been impacted by the adoption of new technologies. Leaders must invite insights, understand how teams work, and identify opportunities for improvement (such as training and breaking down organizational silos with integration methods such as DevOps and DataOps). It’s a win-win situation for everyone.
Leadership should also pay attention to employees who are invested in improving the enterprise through digital transformation and be open to training and nurturing them to continue to build skill sets across teams.
Help Overcome Hybrid Complexity With Visibility
According to the report, the accelerated pace of technology adoption — specifically, running workloads across both cloud and on-premises infrastructure — has created worrisome challenges.
Though more than half (54%) of tech pro respondents stated they leverage monitoring strategies to manage complex hybrid environments, 49% revealed they lack visibility into the majority of their organization’s apps and infrastructure, limiting their ability to see what’s working and what isn’t. Indeed, only 8% of the respondents said they were extremely confident in their ability to manage IT complexity.
For a successful digital transformation, IT admins must be able to monitor individual pieces of the environment and have a single environment-wide perspective. With this level of observability, they can achieve much-needed visibility into the IT networks, systems, and applications supporting digital transformation.
It’s imperative, however, for agencies to invest time and resources in upskilling and training their tech pros so they can properly implement observability strategies and manage hybrid IT realities more effectively. In doing so, they’ll limit further burdening IT teams and put themselves and their teams on the path to long-term success.
Brandon Shopp currently serves as the group vice president of product strategy at SolarWinds. He has a proven success record in product delivery and revenue growth, with a wide variety of software product, business model, M&A, and go-to-market strategies experience. Shopp previously served as VP of product management for network management, systems management, as well as senior director of product management for systems and application management when he joined in 2018. Prior to SolarWinds, Shopp was the vice president of product management at AlienVault and the senior director of products at Embarcadero Technologies. Shopp holds a B.B.A. from Texas A&M University.
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