Dive Brief:
- Organizations are encountering user, revenue or customer related digital performance problems once every five days, according to a report from Dynatrace. Those problems translate to business and IT professionals losing a quarter of their working lives addressing these challenges, according to the report.
- More specifically, IT operations professionals lose 522 hours per year or more than 2 hours every business day, while software developers lose 548 hours per year or more than 2 hours every business day. The report was based on a survey of 1,239 IT and business professionals globally.
- Nearly 50% of respondents say digital performance challenges were directly hindering the success of digital transformation strategies in their organizations. The primary cause: increasing complexity of IT environments.
Dive Insight:
Digital transformation is all the rage today, and numerous reports tout its ability to help businesses compete more effectively, streamline operations and improve their ability to meet and exceed customer expectations. But few studies thus far have examined the complexity issues that go along with digital transformation and just how difficult and expensive digital transformation can be.
If digital performance issues brought about by digital transformation impact customers and revenue, does the business really come out ahead? Perhaps if IT professionals spent their time on other initiatives they could ultimately improve the business in other ways.
Despite the caveats, it appears digital transformation will continue to grow. International Data Corporation (IDC) recently predicted worldwide spending on digital transformation technologies will reach $1.2 trillion in 2017, an increase of 17.8% over 2016. By 2020, IDC says digital transformation spending will reach $2 trillion.
Consulting companies may end up the ultimate winners in all this. The complexity of digital transformation means many companies are turning to consultants to help them manage the process.
