True experience requires observability that maps system signals to journeys.
As someone leading digital transformation in a large, complex organization, I’ve learned that elevating digital experience isn’t about pushing out shiny new interfaces. It’s about what happens behind the screen. It’s about the reliability of APIs, the behavior of backend systems, the responsiveness of teams, and the alignment between technology and business processes.
At the heart of great experience is end-to-end observability—but most enterprises still don’t have it. We might monitor individual systems or applications, but we lack a complete picture that connects the infrastructure layer to the actual user journey. If a customer drops off during onboarding, is it because the server was slow? Because the KYC gateway didn’t respond? Because a rule engine took too long? Without integrated visibility, we’re left guessing.
This fragmentation creates firefighting. IT gets called when something breaks, but without context. Business teams escalate based on outcomes, but they don’t always know where the root issue lies. The result is delay, blame-shifting, and sometimes lost opportunities. We’ve learned that the only real way forward is to connect signals across the stack—app, infra, network, APIs—and make them business-aware.
Monitoring system health isn’t enough— we must monitor business journeys. That’s where the real experience lives.
What’s equally important is how that insight is operationalized. It’s not enough to have dashboards. We need to integrate observability into day-to-day workflows— issue detection, RCA, capacity planning, even change approvals. Our goal is to shift left—to surface potential problems earlier, reduce MTTR, and move from reactive resolution to proactive prevention.
There’s also a cultural shift underway. In the past, experience was seen as a “front end” responsibility—UI/UX, page load speeds, and so on. But we’ve realized that true experience is cross-functional. It’s everyone’s job. Infra teams must ensure uptime and scalability. Developers must build fault-tolerant, modular code. Business teams must define journeys that are efficient and intuitive. And IT operations must monitor it all in context.
One example we saw was in loan processing. A new digital initiative failed to meet expectations—not because the tech didn’t work, but because one downstream system (hosted externally) kept timing out intermittently. Users experienced slowness and abandonment. Traditional monitoring didn’t catch it, because each individual system showed “green.” It was only after introducing journey-based observability that we saw the pattern. That’s when it clicked: monitoring system health isn’t enough—we must monitor business journeys.
Another lesson has been around tool sprawl. Many teams buy their own platforms—marketing has analytics, IT has infra monitors, DevOps has CI/CD tools, and so on. But the lack of a unified source of truth creates friction. We’re now ensuring the tools we use speak to each other, and to us in a language we can act on.
–Authored by Ashish Desai, Joint President and CIO – Textiles Business, Aditya Birla Group