Need for “Speedy” Innovation, Software Updates Puts Pressure on CIOs

With their organizations seeking to gain greater competitive edge, CIOs are under immense pressure to release software updates more rapidly than ever—once a day, if not on the hour, according to a recent survey from Dynatrace. The accompanying “2018 Global CIO Report” covers a range of major challenges that CIOs are facing today, including the software updates, a “need for speed” in innovation, cloud migration and DevOps. The constant demands to innovate swiftly, for example, place the customer experience at risk. And cloud migrations frequently hurt app performance. An estimated 800 global CIOs took part in the research, which was conducted by market research firm Vanson Bourne. This slideshow presents survey highlights, with charts provided courtesy of Dynatrace.

One-half of CIOs said their organization releases software updates into production systems and apps at least daily. And 14 percent said their company does so no less than once an hour.

On average, organizations release 104 new software updates every week into production systems and apps. About nine of 10 CIOs said they believe they will be required to release new updates even faster in the future.

Nearly three-quarters of CIOs said the “need for speed” in digital innovation is placing the customer experience at risk. What’s more, 64 percent said they are compromised more than ever between the need for new innovation and the need to conduct thorough testing.

When moving services to the cloud, 67 percent of CIOs said they face the challenge of ensuring that app performance is not negatively impacted by the move. In addition, 57 percent said they’re challenged in attempting to identify whether the migration of an app to the cloud has delivered the desired benefits.

Dynatrace reports that 68 percent of CIOs said their company has either already implemented DevOps, or are starting to explore the possibilities of doing so. However, 74 percent said their DevOps efforts are undermined by the absence of shared data and toolsets making it difficult for IT to obtain a “single view of the truth.”

When asked to list the biggest barriers of DevOps adoption, the differences in priorities between departmental silos ranked first as cited by 56 percent of CIOs. The fact that teams work with different tools—making for difficult collaboration—ranked second as cited by 55 percent of CIOs.

Unplanned work requires CIOs to pull resources away from digital transformation initiatives, stifling innovation. With easier ways to collaborate between development and operations teams, 78 percent of CIOs said they’d be able to prevent such project delays.

The report reveals that 55 percent of CIOs said IT outages triggered by external issues is a leading cause of unplanned work. Just over one-half of CIOs said the need to resolve performance issues due to database changes is a major generator of unplanned work.