Digital Transformation Projects Show Increasing Improvements

Despite the challenges of the last two years, enterprises have made significant progress with digital transformation — 79% of enterprises have made significant, transformative or even revolutionary improvements to the end user experience through digital transformation over the past year, compared to 73% in 2019 and 72% in 2020, according to Digital Transformation — Lessons Learned and Strategic Setbacks, a global survey of 650 IT leaders conducted by Couchbase.

And the outlook is optimistic — on average, enterprises plan to increase their investment in digital transformation by 46% over the next 12 months.

However, enterprises still need to be aware of digital transformation challenges — 81% of enterprises had digital transformation projects fail, suffer delays or be scaled back in the past year, at an average cost of $4.12 million.

A further 82% were prevented from pursuing digital transformation projects that they wanted to implement due to factors such as a lack of resources or funds (reported by 26%), a lack of skills to deliver the project (24%) or the complexity of implementing technologies (23%).

The consequences of these failed or missed projects can be more than wasted funds — 55% of enterprises that suffered issues with their digital transformation projects had to delay their strategic goals by three months or more, or reset them completely.

Other potential consequences of failing to keep pace identified by respondents include losing valuable staff to more innovative competitors — whether in IT (41%) or other areas of the business (40%); struggling to secure finance or undergo a successful IPO (31%); or going out of business or being absorbed by a competitor (26%).

"The progress in organizations' digital transformation ambitions over the past 12 months is clear, and there's a bright future ahead," said Ravi Mayuram, cto at Couchbase. "Ideally we'll now begin to see enterprises putting into practice projects and ideas that weren't previously considered possible. For this to become reality, organizations need to learn the lessons of the last two years and address the challenges they face, or a large proportion of that 46% increase in investment may be wasted, too. IT teams need support from across the business, together with the resources they need, and the right skills and technology to succeed. From embracing the cloud, to making the best use of data, enterprises that can make use of new technologies will be best placed to thrive."

Lessons Learned

The past two years have had a transformative impact on IT teams.

95% of respondents have implemented or investigated digital transformation opportunities that would not have been realistic at the end of 2019 — from hybrid working (nearly 47%) to moving to the cloud (46%), replacing legacy technology and processes (42%), changing the way the business operates (36%) and creating new business offerings (35%).

Other findings included:
 
■ 99% of enterprises say they learned lessons from the pandemic: including the importance of supporting remote and hybrid working (45%); the need for continuous investment and research in digital transformation technologies (41%); and how to better engage the wider business in digital transformation strategy (34%).

■ Investment priorities are shifting compared to 2019: While security is still the top priority for enterprises, and hybrid working received an understandable boost, modernizing existing technology has fallen as a priority, while adopting new technologies has grown — suggesting enterprises recognize they need completely new, modern tools in order to face the future.

■ Ways of working have changed: 88% of respondents say their digital transformation goals have fundamentally changed over the last two years; 95% have accelerated their application modernization strategies; 90% have changed the way they budget for digital transformation; and 93% say digital transformation projects over the last two years represent permanent changes to the way their business's way of operating or working.

■ End users are the focus: 88% of respondents said their digital transformation projects had been driven more by changes in user behavior than by creating new business opportunities.

Digital transformation ... needs to be the responsibility of, and driven by, the whole C-suite, rather than left solely in IT's hands

"This is an exciting time for the IT industry. We are entering a period of extreme creativity, as organizations shift from digital transformation driven by reacting to outside events, such as the pandemic or competitors' progress, to a more proactive approach driven by ideas from within the business," continued Mayuram. "For this new creativity to work, it needs to be driven from the top. Digital transformation shouldn't only be aligned to strategic goals. As a transformative business asset it needs to be the responsibility of, and driven by, the whole C-suite, rather than left solely in IT's hands. If businesses can do this and put the lessons they learned from the last two years into practice, then the future looks very bright indeed."

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

5 Security Principles Every Entrepreneur Should Apply to Leadership

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Signs It May Be Time to Reassess Your IT Infrastructure Strategy

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Enterprise Edge AI Reaches Inflection Point

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

AI Is Hitting Operational Limits

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

Alert Fatigue Is No Longer a Morale Problem, It's a Reliability Risk and a System Failure

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

Most Enterprises Think They Can Switch AI Vendors in a Month ... Most Who've Tried Couldn't

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Your Observability Stack Has a Telemetry Pipeline Problem

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...

Digital Transformation Projects Show Increasing Improvements

Despite the challenges of the last two years, enterprises have made significant progress with digital transformation — 79% of enterprises have made significant, transformative or even revolutionary improvements to the end user experience through digital transformation over the past year, compared to 73% in 2019 and 72% in 2020, according to Digital Transformation — Lessons Learned and Strategic Setbacks, a global survey of 650 IT leaders conducted by Couchbase.

And the outlook is optimistic — on average, enterprises plan to increase their investment in digital transformation by 46% over the next 12 months.

However, enterprises still need to be aware of digital transformation challenges — 81% of enterprises had digital transformation projects fail, suffer delays or be scaled back in the past year, at an average cost of $4.12 million.

A further 82% were prevented from pursuing digital transformation projects that they wanted to implement due to factors such as a lack of resources or funds (reported by 26%), a lack of skills to deliver the project (24%) or the complexity of implementing technologies (23%).

The consequences of these failed or missed projects can be more than wasted funds — 55% of enterprises that suffered issues with their digital transformation projects had to delay their strategic goals by three months or more, or reset them completely.

Other potential consequences of failing to keep pace identified by respondents include losing valuable staff to more innovative competitors — whether in IT (41%) or other areas of the business (40%); struggling to secure finance or undergo a successful IPO (31%); or going out of business or being absorbed by a competitor (26%).

"The progress in organizations' digital transformation ambitions over the past 12 months is clear, and there's a bright future ahead," said Ravi Mayuram, cto at Couchbase. "Ideally we'll now begin to see enterprises putting into practice projects and ideas that weren't previously considered possible. For this to become reality, organizations need to learn the lessons of the last two years and address the challenges they face, or a large proportion of that 46% increase in investment may be wasted, too. IT teams need support from across the business, together with the resources they need, and the right skills and technology to succeed. From embracing the cloud, to making the best use of data, enterprises that can make use of new technologies will be best placed to thrive."

Lessons Learned

The past two years have had a transformative impact on IT teams.

95% of respondents have implemented or investigated digital transformation opportunities that would not have been realistic at the end of 2019 — from hybrid working (nearly 47%) to moving to the cloud (46%), replacing legacy technology and processes (42%), changing the way the business operates (36%) and creating new business offerings (35%).

Other findings included:
 
■ 99% of enterprises say they learned lessons from the pandemic: including the importance of supporting remote and hybrid working (45%); the need for continuous investment and research in digital transformation technologies (41%); and how to better engage the wider business in digital transformation strategy (34%).

■ Investment priorities are shifting compared to 2019: While security is still the top priority for enterprises, and hybrid working received an understandable boost, modernizing existing technology has fallen as a priority, while adopting new technologies has grown — suggesting enterprises recognize they need completely new, modern tools in order to face the future.

■ Ways of working have changed: 88% of respondents say their digital transformation goals have fundamentally changed over the last two years; 95% have accelerated their application modernization strategies; 90% have changed the way they budget for digital transformation; and 93% say digital transformation projects over the last two years represent permanent changes to the way their business's way of operating or working.

■ End users are the focus: 88% of respondents said their digital transformation projects had been driven more by changes in user behavior than by creating new business opportunities.

Digital transformation ... needs to be the responsibility of, and driven by, the whole C-suite, rather than left solely in IT's hands

"This is an exciting time for the IT industry. We are entering a period of extreme creativity, as organizations shift from digital transformation driven by reacting to outside events, such as the pandemic or competitors' progress, to a more proactive approach driven by ideas from within the business," continued Mayuram. "For this new creativity to work, it needs to be driven from the top. Digital transformation shouldn't only be aligned to strategic goals. As a transformative business asset it needs to be the responsibility of, and driven by, the whole C-suite, rather than left solely in IT's hands. If businesses can do this and put the lessons they learned from the last two years into practice, then the future looks very bright indeed."

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

5 Security Principles Every Entrepreneur Should Apply to Leadership

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Signs It May Be Time to Reassess Your IT Infrastructure Strategy

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Enterprise Edge AI Reaches Inflection Point

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

AI Is Hitting Operational Limits

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

Alert Fatigue Is No Longer a Morale Problem, It's a Reliability Risk and a System Failure

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

Most Enterprises Think They Can Switch AI Vendors in a Month ... Most Who've Tried Couldn't

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Your Observability Stack Has a Telemetry Pipeline Problem

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...