A survey published this week by New Relic, a provider of IT monitoring services, suggests there is a high correlation between organizations that have embarked on digital business transformation initiatives and adoption of best DevOps practices.
Revealed at the Futurestack conference hosted by New Relic, the survey 750 global senior IT decision-makers of enterprises with 500 to 5,000-plus employees in Australia, France, Germany, UK and the U.S. conducted by the market research firm Vanson Bourne finds roughly 50% of organizations in the U.S. have completed or are close to completing their digital transformation journeys.
The same survey finds nearly two-thirds of U.S. respondents in the region claim they’ve adopted DevOps practices.
Buddy Brewer, group vice president and general manager for client side analytics at New Relic, said the challenge most organizations face in terms of DevOps is they lack access to real-time analytics. DevOps teams may have access a raft of metrics, but all the data they have only tells them how many times something occurs on average. Roughly half of end users may be having a satisfactory application experience, but the half that are not are the company’s most important customers, noted Brewer.
Overall, the survey finds that that there’s nothing easy about modernizing IT environments to drive digital transformation initiatives. Nearly three-quarters (72%) expect the technology team to deliver more innovations and updates. However, more than 50% said they find their complex new software and infrastructure difficult to manage and monitor for performance issues.
Nearly half the respondents (48%) also admitted end users or customers are likely to tell them about a problem before they know about it and 46% said they are told about these issues before they know how to fix them.
At the same time, 79% said the rest of the business has higher expectations in how digital systems perform and 63% admitted that because of pressure to respond to business needs, they work longer hours to observe and manage software performance. Almost half (46%) said C-suite executives want daily updates about how software systems are performing and 40% said CEOs also want more answers when outages or performance problems happen.
More than half (56%) of all respondents acknowledged that it is impossible to properly assess all the machine data being collected. Just as troubling, a third said they are challenged on business benefit metrics for their digital transformation projects.
The survey identifies the top five digital transformation challenges:
- Separate parts of the organization are moving at different speeds to embrace digital transformation.
- Shortage of skilled employees.
- Restricted budgets.
- Understanding and measuring business benefits.
- Continued resistance to shutting down legacy systems.
As always in the case of IT professionals, however, hope springs eternal. A full 89% said they believe artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms will become important element for managing digital systems. That may indeed come about one day. However, until that day arrives, DevOps teams should count on the fact that every digital business transformation project that gets launched equates to a lot more hard work for them.