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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.

The Latest

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

We just surveyed 300 frontend and mobile engineers across 16 countries, and the finding that keeps sticking with me isn't the one about AI. It's this: 74% of engineering teams rate themselves in the "middle" of the observability maturity scale. Not reactive, not strategic. Stuck in the middle. They have dashboards, they have tracing, they have alerts. And yet when something goes wrong, they still can't tell you why ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 25, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses  AI's impact on the Wide Area Network (WAN) ... 

Application performance monitoring (APM) dashboards are only as useful as what they are configured to measure. The default setup covers obvious failure modes such as downtime, error spikes, and latency breaches, but it does not cover everything. Some failures produce no alerts or anomalies. The dashboard stays green while users experience a broken product. Here are six signs that is happening ...

The race to deploy AI is largely over. Most enterprises have entered it. The question now is not whether artificial intelligence is running inside the organization. The question is whether anyone is genuinely responsible for what it does. That is not a technical question. It is a leadership one. And most organizations are not yet structured to answer it honestly ...

A new analysis of 250 real-world queries across common retail tasks, such as product pricing, availability, ratings, shipping and specifications, reveals systemic inefficiency at the heart of web-based AI agents. On average, 97.9% of the data retrieved by agents from live web pages is irrelevant to the query being answered. Specifically, the average page ingested ran nearly 9,000 characters, while the average answer was just 32 characters, resulting in a noise-to-signal ratio of 278:1. Price queries were the most extreme outlier, with noise rates approaching 99.5%. That's not a rounding error. That's a structural problem ...

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...