Digital Transformation is all about improving network performance, expanding communication channels for customers, and raising employee productivity via assistive technologies with the idea of putting customers first.

One of the biggest challenges businesses face today is how to keep up with the pace of change, and what they should do first at a time when Digital Transformation is recasting traditional business models and redefining what it means to be competitive.

With this in mind, here are five tips to help you to prepare your network for stellar Digital Transformation performance in the year ahead…

1. Monitor everything - To get the most from your Unified Communications (UC) investment, it's important to take a holistic performance management approach. Active monitoring and event correlation are required of both the UC system and the IT infrastructure of servers, routers, and switches surrounding it. This gets you to the root of the problem faster and being able to do that from a single dashboard makes your team more responsive.

2. Test your network before deploying new services - Since voice traffic places different demands on a network than data, most bandwidth and speed testing tools fail to measure what will happen to voice quality as the number of simultaneous calls increases. Specialized tools will give you a more accurate picture of your network's fitness prior to deployment, arming you with the knowledge needed to increase capacity or bandwidth and prevent future problems.

3. Change your support game from reactive to proactive – “Break and fix” is yesterday's news… Digital transformation depends on the ability to be proactive when it comes to network performance. This means knowing when there's a problem by using threshold-based monitoring of key performance metrics like voice quality. Set thresholds lower and you'll know when a problem is brewing, before it impacts users.

4. Focus on the most important problems - With today’s complex networks it can feel like alerts and notifications are coming at you fast and furious from all sides. Use monitoring tools that sift through the clutter by using machine learning, thresholds, and customizable alert profiles to identify your most important problems. Visualization features like network diagrams that tie alarms to the trouble spot can also help you pinpoint your most important problems quickly.

5.Understand your users’ experience - Network performance data can provide valuable insights on the user's experience. Metrics like bandwidth utilization, ping time, and latency can point you toward overcapacity that will result in a slow or interrupted user experience. On a UC network, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunks stretched to the limit in terms of bandwidth capacity can cause a busy signal when users pick up the phone, so staying on top of trunk usage is important.

Digital transformation and rapid technology adoption are becoming competitive differentiators for today's businesses. As the New Year approaches, it would be wise to reconsider your technology provider relationships in favor of those that understand Digital Transformation and the positive impact it can have on your business when implemented right.

Jeff Nolte is President and CEO of CTS, a leading Voice and IT services provider based in Millersville, Maryland. He may be reached at (800) 787-4848 or jnolte@ctsmd.us. Visit: www.ctsmd.us.