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CIOs Say: The Need for Rapid Innovation Puts Customer Experience at Risk

John Van Siclen

CIOs of 73% of organizations say the need for speed in digital innovation is putting customer experience at risk, according to an independent global survey of 800 CIOs commissioned by Dynatrace.

The study found that on average, organizations release new software updates three times per working hour, as they push to keep up with competitive pressures and soaring consumer expectation.


Looking ahead, 89% of CIOs said they will need to release updates even faster in the future. However, the speed of releases can come at a cost. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of CIOs admitted they are forced to compromise between faster innovation and the need to ensure customers have a great software experience.

“Every organization on the planet is a software company these days. Market leaders like Amazon are releasing multiple software updates every second. Consequently, the modern approach to delivering software is about agile, fast development cycles and releasing into dynamic, hybrid multi-cloud environments,” said Andreas Grabner, DevOps Activist, Dynatrace. “Yet end users also expect the steady flow of new features and updates to work perfectly, without compromise. The challenge for IT is to deliver fast, while moving to a cloud native architecture and maintaining user experience.”

The new CIO report looks at the pains organizations face as they strive for new heights of agility and speed. Key findings include:

Cloud enables agility but CIOs struggle with:

■ Ensuring software performance isn’t negatively impacted (67%)

■ Identifying if moving an application to the cloud has delivered the desired benefits (57%)

■ Understanding if an application is well-suited to the cloud (55%)

■ Re-architecting legacy applications for the cloud (51%)

■ Ensuring the user-experience isn’t impacted during the migration process (48%)

Lack of collaboration and visibility leads to innovation delays:

■ 78% of CIOs said their organization has experienced IT project delays that could have been prevented if development and operations teams were able to easily collaborate

■ CIOs said digital transformation initiatives were most frequently derailed by:

- IT outages caused by external issues (55%)

- IT outages caused by internal changes (50%)

- Rectifying bad code that has been pushed through the pipeline (45%)

Organizations face challenges as they turn to DevOps to improve collaboration:

■ 68% of organizations have implemented or are exploring the possibilities of a DevOps culture to improve collaboration and drive faster innovation

■ 74% of CIOs said that DevOps efforts are often being undermined by the absence of shared data and tools, which makes it difficult for IT teams to obtain a single view of "the truth"

■ 56% of CIOs identified differences in priorities between departmental siloes as an additional barrier to DevOps adoption

“The challenge for all organizations is to get a holistic view of the DevOps pipeline – from idea to code to experience. As DevOps has matured, enterprises are looking to automate and integrate their software development to release faster, with higher quality, and with less manual effort. It’s exciting to see AI play an even greater role in reducing manual tasks, so we can do what we love – write better software, deploy with speed, and deliver perfect software experiences,” adds Grabner.

About the Survey: This report, commissioned by Dynatrace, is based on a global survey of 800 CIOs in large enterprises with over 1,000 employees, conducted by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by Dynatrace. The sample included 200 respondents in the US, 100 in the UK, France, Germany and China, and 50 in Australia, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico respectively.

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CIOs Say: The Need for Rapid Innovation Puts Customer Experience at Risk

John Van Siclen

CIOs of 73% of organizations say the need for speed in digital innovation is putting customer experience at risk, according to an independent global survey of 800 CIOs commissioned by Dynatrace.

The study found that on average, organizations release new software updates three times per working hour, as they push to keep up with competitive pressures and soaring consumer expectation.


Looking ahead, 89% of CIOs said they will need to release updates even faster in the future. However, the speed of releases can come at a cost. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of CIOs admitted they are forced to compromise between faster innovation and the need to ensure customers have a great software experience.

“Every organization on the planet is a software company these days. Market leaders like Amazon are releasing multiple software updates every second. Consequently, the modern approach to delivering software is about agile, fast development cycles and releasing into dynamic, hybrid multi-cloud environments,” said Andreas Grabner, DevOps Activist, Dynatrace. “Yet end users also expect the steady flow of new features and updates to work perfectly, without compromise. The challenge for IT is to deliver fast, while moving to a cloud native architecture and maintaining user experience.”

The new CIO report looks at the pains organizations face as they strive for new heights of agility and speed. Key findings include:

Cloud enables agility but CIOs struggle with:

■ Ensuring software performance isn’t negatively impacted (67%)

■ Identifying if moving an application to the cloud has delivered the desired benefits (57%)

■ Understanding if an application is well-suited to the cloud (55%)

■ Re-architecting legacy applications for the cloud (51%)

■ Ensuring the user-experience isn’t impacted during the migration process (48%)

Lack of collaboration and visibility leads to innovation delays:

■ 78% of CIOs said their organization has experienced IT project delays that could have been prevented if development and operations teams were able to easily collaborate

■ CIOs said digital transformation initiatives were most frequently derailed by:

- IT outages caused by external issues (55%)

- IT outages caused by internal changes (50%)

- Rectifying bad code that has been pushed through the pipeline (45%)

Organizations face challenges as they turn to DevOps to improve collaboration:

■ 68% of organizations have implemented or are exploring the possibilities of a DevOps culture to improve collaboration and drive faster innovation

■ 74% of CIOs said that DevOps efforts are often being undermined by the absence of shared data and tools, which makes it difficult for IT teams to obtain a single view of "the truth"

■ 56% of CIOs identified differences in priorities between departmental siloes as an additional barrier to DevOps adoption

“The challenge for all organizations is to get a holistic view of the DevOps pipeline – from idea to code to experience. As DevOps has matured, enterprises are looking to automate and integrate their software development to release faster, with higher quality, and with less manual effort. It’s exciting to see AI play an even greater role in reducing manual tasks, so we can do what we love – write better software, deploy with speed, and deliver perfect software experiences,” adds Grabner.

About the Survey: This report, commissioned by Dynatrace, is based on a global survey of 800 CIOs in large enterprises with over 1,000 employees, conducted by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by Dynatrace. The sample included 200 respondents in the US, 100 in the UK, France, Germany and China, and 50 in Australia, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico respectively.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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

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 ...