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Companies Experiencing Performance Problems Every 5 Days

IT Complexity and Performance Challenges are Killing Digital Transformation Initiatives
John Van Siclen

Organizations are encountering user, revenue or customer-impacting digital performance problems once every five days, according a new study by Dynatrace.

Furthermore, the study entitled Global Digital Performance and Transformation Audit reveals that individuals across business and IT functions are losing a quarter of their working lives battling to address these problems.

The study found that 75 percent of respondents had low levels of confidence in their ability to resolve digital performance problems. Equally concerning is that 48 percent 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. 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 percent of IT operations professionals would spend more time researching and deploying new systems/technologies.

■ 36 percent of app and web developers would spend more time on research, development and deploying new technologies.

■ 36 percent of e-Commerce specialists would focus on optimizing revenue and engagement.

■ 31 percent of digital marketing and communications professionals would spend more time on strategy and planning.

■ 30 percent of customer experience and support professionals would spend more time engaging with customers and building advocacy programs.

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.

Methodology: Research Now conducted the survey on behalf of Dynatrace. Survey respondents were 1,239 IT and business professionals from enterprises in the USA, UK, France, Germany and Australia.

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Companies Experiencing Performance Problems Every 5 Days

IT Complexity and Performance Challenges are Killing Digital Transformation Initiatives
John Van Siclen

Organizations are encountering user, revenue or customer-impacting digital performance problems once every five days, according a new study by Dynatrace.

Furthermore, the study entitled Global Digital Performance and Transformation Audit reveals that individuals across business and IT functions are losing a quarter of their working lives battling to address these problems.

The study found that 75 percent of respondents had low levels of confidence in their ability to resolve digital performance problems. Equally concerning is that 48 percent 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. 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 percent of IT operations professionals would spend more time researching and deploying new systems/technologies.

■ 36 percent of app and web developers would spend more time on research, development and deploying new technologies.

■ 36 percent of e-Commerce specialists would focus on optimizing revenue and engagement.

■ 31 percent of digital marketing and communications professionals would spend more time on strategy and planning.

■ 30 percent of customer experience and support professionals would spend more time engaging with customers and building advocacy programs.

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.

Methodology: Research Now conducted the survey on behalf of Dynatrace. Survey respondents were 1,239 IT and business professionals from enterprises in the USA, UK, France, Germany and Australia.

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While 87% of manufacturing leaders and technical specialists report that ROI from their AIOps initiatives has met or exceeded expectations, only 37% say they are fully prepared to operationalize AI at scale, according to The Future of IT Operations in the AI Era, a report from Riverbed ...

Many organizations rely on cloud-first architectures to aggregate, analyze, and act on their operational data ... However, not all environments are conducive to cloud-first architectures ... There are limitations to cloud-first architectures that render them ineffective in mission-critical situations where responsiveness, cost control, and data sovereignty are non-negotiable; these limitations include ...

For years, cybersecurity was built around a simple assumption: protect the physical network and trust everything inside it. That model made sense when employees worked in offices, applications lived in data centers, and devices rarely left the building. Today's reality is fluid: people work from everywhere, applications run across multiple clouds, and AI-driven agents are beginning to act on behalf of users. But while the old perimeter dissolved, a new one quietly emerged ...

For years, infrastructure teams have treated compute as a relatively stable input. Capacity was provisioned, costs were forecasted, and performance expectations were set based on the assumption that identical resources behaved identically. That mental model is starting to break down. AI infrastructure is no longer behaving like static cloud capacity. It is increasingly behaving like a market ...

Resilience can no longer be defined by how quickly an organization recovers from an incident or disruption. The effectiveness of any resilience strategy is dependent on its ability to anticipate change, operate under continuous stress, and adapt confidently amid uncertainty ...

Mobile users are less tolerant of app instability than ever before. According to a new report from Luciq, No Margin for Error: What Mobile Users Expect and What Mobile Leaders Must Deliver in 2026, even minor performance issues now result in immediate abandonment, lost purchases, and long-term brand impact ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the dominant force shaping enterprise data strategies. Boards expect progress. Executives expect returns. And data leaders are under pressure to prove that their organizations are "AI-ready" ...

Agentic AI is a major buzzword for 2026. Many tech companies are making bold promises about this technology, but many aren't grounded in reality, at least not yet. This coming year will likely be shaped by reality checks for IT teams, and progress will only come from a focus on strong foundations and disciplined execution ...

AI systems are still prone to hallucinations and misjudgments ... To build the trust needed for adoption, AI must be paired with human-in-the-loop (HITL) oversight, or checkpoints where humans verify, guide, and decide what actions are taken. The balance between autonomy and accountability is what will allow AI to deliver on its promise without sacrificing human trust ...

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