‘Digital performance’ issues that impact customers and revenue are rearing their ugly heads once every five days, according to a global survey by Dynatrace.
The company’s Global Digital Performance and Transformation Audit also found that 84 per cent of Australian firms reported low levels of confidence in their ability to fix technology issues, more than any other country surveyed.
When asked what was causing these performance challenges, 38 per cent of local respondents pointed the finger at the increasing complexity of their technology environments. Some 44 per cent said that the lack of collaboration between IT operations, developers, lines of business and customer support was a major hurdle in rectifying problems.
Digital performance challenges were directly hindering the success of digital transformation strategies at 40 per cent of Australian businesses surveyed.
Rafi Katanasho, Dynatrace's APAC chief technical officer, said the challenges facing companies going through a digital transformation were multitude and mammoth.
“Australians are one of the fastest adopters of new technology which is why enterprises and government departments are faced with the internal challenge to ensure their systems are well placed to service their users,” he said.
“On top of this, customers have never been more vocal, more demanding and more likely to rant on social channels if digital experiences aren’t perfect. They’re also comparing and benchmarking their digital experiences with local companies against international giants like Amazon, Facebook, Uber and more. It’s a race to compete that will never stop.”
IT departments’ shift to rapid release cycles mean they need to see how end user experience is affected in real time and fix fast when there are issues, Katanasho added. IT environments were also becoming more complex, he said.
“The explosion of cloud technologies, IoT brings with it a huge opportunity for innovation but also huge IT complexity. A single application can have billions of dependencies. One single user transaction can use 82 different types of technologies in your IT environment,” he explained
Time bandits
If their time wasn’t swallowed up by firefighting problems or waiting for them to be solved, 32 per cent of IT operations professionals said they would spend more time researching and deploying new systems and technologies.
More than a third (36 per cent) of app and web developers would spend more time on research, development and deploying new technologies and 36 per cent of e-Commerce specialists would focus on optimising revenue and engagement.
According to the IHS, businesses are losing $700 billion a year to IT downtime.
To grab back the dent to efficiency caused by performance problems, businesses should consider automation, Katanasho said.
“One of the key ways for Australian businesses to be more efficient is to accelerate breaking down the departmental silos and leverage and apply automation delivered through AI. This will help provide solutions to help empower teams to collaborate from the same source of truth and keep innovating, to differentiate their offering.
“We’re also seeing organisations persevere with multiple performance monitoring solutions which means a business is never able to see the full IT stack holistically – which makes problem resolution near on impossible – nor map performance problems back to business outcomes.”
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