IT complexity and performance challenges killing digital transformation initiatives

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Digital performance management company, Dynatrace, has announced the findings of an independent survey of 1,239 IT and business professionals globally.

It reveals that organisations are encountering user, revenue or customer-impacting digital performance problems once every five days. Also, it reveals that individuals across business and IT functions are losing a quarter of their working lives battling to address these problems.

Furthermore, the study found that 75% of respondents had low levels of confidence in their ability to resolve digital performance problems. Equally concerning is that 48% of these respondents stated digital performance challenges were directly hindering the success of digital transformation strategies in their organizations. When asked what was causing these performance challenges, respondents most frequently pointed to the increasing complexity of their technology environments.

"A business' reliance on technology to remain competitive and succeed in a modern world has accelerated more in the last 3 years than during the last 30," said John Van Siclen, CEO at Dynatrace. "While today's technology is extremely powerful, the result is a hyperscale, hypercomplex corporate IT environment, which can create a very real barrier to succeeding at digital performance. If you don't master this complexity challenge, at the end of the day your customers, employees and bottom line will suffer."

The research also uncovered that a combination of the above issues is directly contributing to individuals across multiple business functions wasting hundreds of hours each year dealing with digital performance issues that impact customers and revenue.

Average time each business and IT professional loses battling digital performance problems:

• IT operations professionals lose 522 hours per year or over 2 hours every business day
• Software developers lose 548 hours per year or over 2 hours every business day
• E-commerce professionals lose 652 hours per year or over 2.5 hours every business day
• Marketing professionals lose 470 hours per year or nearly 2 hours every business day
• Customer service professionals lose 496 hours per year or 2 hours every business day

If they could reclaim this time business and IT professionals' productivity would improve:

• 32% of IT operations professionals would spend more time researching and deploying new systems/technologies
• 36% of app and web developers would spend more time on research, development and deploying new technologies
• 36% of e-Commerce specialists would focus on optimising revenue and engagement
• 31% of digital marketing and communications professionals would spend more time on strategy and planning
• 30% of customer experience and support professionals would spend more time engaging with customers and building advocacy programs

John Van Siclen concluded, "To differentiate and stay ahead of changing consumer expectations, businesses must make sure they're able to instantly pinpoint problems in the IT environment that are impacting digital performance. The key is to identify degradations that affect users immediately, pinpoint root cause precisely and fix before users are affected. Given the hyper-complexity of today's application environments and the tech stacks they run on, an all-in-one monitoring approach powered by artificial intelligence has emerged as a new requirement. It's no longer humanly possible to drill into multiple dashboards, research a variety of alerts and search through thousands of log files to discover root cause in the few minutes you have between initial degradation and severe user impact."

Research Now conducted the survey on behalf of Dynatrace. The 1,239 IT and business professionals came from enterprises in the USA, UK, France, Germany and Australia.