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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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Many organizations describe AI as strategic, but they do not manage it strategically. When AI plans are disconnected from strategy, detached from organizational learning, and protected from serious assumptions testing, the problem is no longer technical immaturity; it is a failure of management discipline ... Executives too often tell organizations to "use AI" before they define what AI is supposed to change. The problem deepens in organizations where strategy isn't well articulated in the first place ...

Across the enterprise technology landscape, a quiet crisis is playing out. Organizations have run hundreds, sometimes thousands, of generative AI pilots. Leadership has celebrated the proof of concept (POCs) ... Industry experience points to a sobering reality: only 5-10% of AI POCs that progress to the pilot stage successfully reach scaled production. The remaining 90% fail because the enterprise environment around them was never ready to absorb them, not the AI models ...

Today's modern systems are not what they once were. Organizations now rely on distributed systems, event-driven workflows, hybrid and multi-cloud environments and continuous delivery pipelines. While each adds flexibility, it also introduces new, often invisible failures. Development speed is no longer the primary bottleneck of innovation. Reliability is ...

Seeing is believing, or in this case, seeing is understanding, according to New Relic's 2025 Observability Forecast for Retail and eCommerce report. Retailers who want to provide exceptional customer experiences while improving IT operations efficiency are leaning on observability ... Here are five key takeaways from the report ...

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Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...