The results of a new report, “How IT Operations Leaders Can Deliver Business Value in an Economic Slowdown,” highlights new tech initiatives and priorities during Covid-19. By all fiscal measures, the U.S. and global economy has taken a bitter downward spiral in the last six weeks. With ever-growing jobless claims and stock market losses, many IT execs are quickly re-shifting all priorities and strategies to cope with great uncertainty over the next 12 months.

Most IT professionals are working from home, enduring all the new challenges for productivity under a heavier workload. Some IT pros are working in companies where revenue forecasts are grim. But it’s time to put the gloom and doom aside for a moment. As my mother told me when our first-born was keeping us up all night: everything is temporary. While we’re in this unnerving phase of life and work, let’s take a look today at the positives and that begins with IT budgets.

As enterprise IT systems have become more complex and distributed due to cloud infrastructure, containers, serverless technology, an ever-growing footprint of applications and devices, IoT, SDN, open source development tools and more, the practice of performance monitoring has become far more nuanced. In these modern IT environments, traditional monitoring practices centered on known issues aren’t enough.

There is a dark side to digital transformation, but nobody wants to talk about it. I previously wrote about technical debt. But there’s also complexity debt. When a CIO decides to delay modernizing or upgrading systems, there are usually budget considerations and skills gaps that stand in the way. The IT leader’s job is one of continual evaluation of risk and opportunity amid rapid technology disruption.

This is part two in our blog series on Digital Transformation during Covid-19. You can read the first blog here. The global pandemic and subsequent lockdowns affecting over half the world’s population are already affecting digital transformation, on both an organizational and employee level. Starting by improving your internal customer experience is a good first step, after which digital transformation efforts can and should focus on enhancing the external customer experience in every way.

CIOs and other IT leaders know the importance of having a well-oiled machine to support the vast requirements of the business. Not having a Google-like experience of an always-up, always-fast, easy to use technology ecosystem can be a competitive disadvantage. More pressing is that while most businesses want to reinvent, through digital transformation or other methods, these large-scale efforts fail 70% of the time.

Donnie Berkholz is a VP of IT Service Delivery and comments frequently on trends in IT infrastructure in his newsletter. We talked to Donnie about his typical day on the job, his initiatives in self-service platforms and product management and his take on top infrastructure management trends such as AIOps and Kubernetes.