Progress has been made with digital transformation projects, however technology leaders are finding that running their digitally transformed organizations is challenging and they are under increased pressure to prove business value, according to a survey from New Relic.
Key findings from the survey include:
■ 1 in 2 tech leaders are challenged in managing and monitoring their digitally transformed organizations
■ Almost 50 percent of respondents admit that their customers are more likely to uncover problems before them
■ 89 percent of the survey respondents believe AI and ML will become important for how organizations run their digital systems
“The next phase of digital transformation will focus on making sense of all the data so that organizations can move faster, make better decisions, and create best-in-class digital experiences,” said Buddy Brewer, GVP and GM Client Side Monitoring, New Relic. “As indicated in our research, observing and acting on insights from data collected will play a critical role in helping digitally transformed organizations truly scale and realize the benefits of modern technological advances.”
The Challenges of Digital Transformation
Global organizations claim to be significantly progressing their digital transformation projects, with 39 percent of global respondents saying these are completed or close to completion. Satisfaction levels also seem to be high with 91 percent of respondents saying results met and exceeded. However, respondents shared that the top five challenges to successfully sustain digital transformation are:
1. Separate parts of the organization are moving at different speeds to embrace digital transformation, which holds back collective progress
2. Shortage of skilled employees
3. Restricted budgets
4. Understanding and measuring business benefits
5. Continued resistance to shutting down legacy systems
Factors Contributing to These Challenges
■ Increased complexity: More than 50 percent of respondents say they find their complex new software and infrastructure hard to manage and monitor for performance issues. Most (63 percent) say that the pressure to respond to business needs means they are having to work longer hours to observe and manage software performance correctly.
■ Higher expectations: Most respondents (79 percent) agree that the rest of the business has higher expectations in how digital systems perform; and expect the technology team to deliver more and more innovations and updates (72 percent).
■ Lack of visibility: 48 percent of respondents admitted that their end users or customers tell them about a problem with digital apps before they know about it, and a further 46 percent say they are told about these issues before they know how to fix them.
■ Accountability: 46 percent of their C-suite executives want daily updates about how software systems are performing for staff and customers (54 percent of US respondents reported this trend). A further 40 percent of CEOs also want more answers when outages or performance problems happen,
■ Challenges analyzing data: A root cause for how teams struggle to manage modern software may be how the amount of machine generated data is rising rapidly. More than half (56 percent) of all respondents acknowledged that it is humanly impossible to properly assess this data. Notably, the larger organizations agree more strongly this is a problem: 58 percent of respondents from businesses of 3,000 to 4,999 employees and 55 percent of those with more than 5,000 staff.
■ Determining business metrics: 1 in 3 respondents report that they are challenged on business benefit metrics for their digital transformation projects.
Check back tomorrow for: Digital Transformation Part 2 - Looking Ahead
Methodology: The study commissioned by New Relic in partnership with Vanson Bourne, a market research firm, surveyed 750 global senior IT decision makers of enterprises with 500 to 5,000-plus employees in Australia, France, Germany, UK, and the US.
