DEJ's 2022 IT Performance Management Study: Key Takeaways

DEJ's 2022 IT performance management study shines a light on the 24 areas impacting IT teams today. The pain points giving IT teams sleepless nights are all here – the war for talent, managing complexity, data management and analytics at scale, for example. As you delve deeper, however, a pattern begins to emerge – it all comes down to business outcomes.

Focus on business outcomes

DEJ's study showed that managing IT performance is having a tremendous impact on the business across four main areas:

• Competitive advantage

• ROI
• Cost of not acting
• Impact on business outcomes

A significant 84% of the organizations that DEJ surveyed identified the need to align IT performance to business outcomes as the #1 capability they want to deploy. It's easy to see why once you start breaking down the numbers. Only 39% of organizations surveyed reported a positive upturn in business performance from innovation initiatives. Further, 75% reported experiencing a negative impact on business performance because of technology management issues they were unaware of.  

Naturally, the financial implications of this deficiency are huge. DEJ notes that organizations are losing an average of $7.63 million annually due to not aligning software initiatives to business outcomes.

Interestingly, DEJ's findings chime with our own research in this space. Note what our annual SRE Report observed in 2021: "What [organizations] are not doing is sufficiently aligning themselves with business outcomes or realizing customer value. This is the direction in which business leaders typically take the conversation."

So, what does DEJ recommend?

"Areas such as reliability, user experience, speed to the market and resource optimization should be given strategic importance as their impact on the business is already enormous and constantly increasing.”  

Speed, reliability and modernizing IT operations

According to DEJ, a significant challenge reported by 65% of organizations was finding the right balance between speed of releases and reliability of digital services. Walking a fiscal tightrope, companies lost an average of $35.5 million due to delays in release times and roughly $17 million because of releasing too soon.  

Finding this balance proved a key driver for organizations adopting observability solutions, with 55% of companies reporting the need to modernize and transform their approach to managing IT operations. Where is the trend going? DEJ states, "The research shows that the key value areas for IT operations are shifting from traditional troubleshooting and cost reduction to managing change and enabling innovation."

Organizations waking up to the need to modernize and transform their approach to managing IT operations was another trend found in the research. Since 2019, there's been a 52% increase in the number of companies admitting that visibility into user experience was a problem. The silver lining is that organizations that adopted unified platforms for managing IT operations were more successful, with those that leveraged such solutions experiencing 91% reliability.  

Another trend was the complexity that came with adopting new types of technology architecture and infrastructure. For example, organizations experienced a nearly 12-fold increase in complexity after deploying microservices. The top performing companies, however, embraced complexity and turned it into an advantage by using the right mix of capabilities to control it and turn it into a competitive advantage.  

Customer and employee experience are fundamental

Across the last 18 months, 41% more companies than previously reported that "enabling new and unique customer experiences" was the key driver for investing in IT performance technologies. In 2022, this is the main goal for most digital businesses. It's easy to see why – user experience issues led to an average annual loss of $16.7 million. However, achieving this goal will not be easy, with user expectations for experience and performance increasing exponentially in the last two years.  

An increasing concern for many organizations is the lack of visibility into employee experience. 74% of companies reported a lack of visibility of employee experience as an obstacle to adopting “work from anywhere” initiatives. Conversely, organizations that monitored employee experience had a 61% lower employee turnover.  

To achieve their customer and employee experience goals, DEJ strongly advises enterprises to deploy capabilities for monitoring experience from the user's perspective. All of this brings us to the increasing importance of observability.  

The rising demand for observability solutions

Despite managing exceptional user experience being the primary goal of IT initiatives, nearly three-quarters of organizations reported not having visibility into their users' experience. Consequently, 51% of organizations were unaware if innovation was driving business benefits. Another red flag is the 41% average increase in business impact due to blind spots in digital delivery chains over the last three years.  

To address this need, 64% of organizations have deployed or are looking to deploy observability capabilities. DEJ note that this trend will only increase:

"One of the key reasons observability has become such a 'hot' term is that having full visibility has become more important, more difficult to achieve and requires a new approach."  

The study highlights market confusion about what observability really is and how to differentiate it from other solutions. To reduce some of that market noise, DEJ made this helpful recommendation:

"Solutions that a) do not provide a business context around IT performance, and b) are not effective in cloud-native environments, should not be part of the observability vendor landscape."

Conclusion

DEJ's study showed that numerous segments of IT performance impact business, some more than others. In making their final recommendations, DEJ urges companies to "rethink their approach [for monitoring], and ensure they eliminate 'blind spots' that can deteriorate business performance." That's why the world's most innovative companies use our digital experience observability platform. See how Catchpoint can help you gain a complete, end-to-end view into your systems.  

Download the study