Study: Silos Are the Chief Impediment to IT and Business Value

Dynatrace sponsored this post.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: IT leaders are increasingly concerned about their teams’ ability to keep up with the pace of digital transformation. Despite the DevOps revolution, organizations have generally not integrated DevOps culture yet, resulting in developers, operations teams and other stakeholders remaining siloed.

In other words, while DevOps practices allow organizations to achieve amazing boosts in agility and their ability to deploy and update applications at faster-than-ever cadences, much work remains to be done to apply those practices across the organization and address the challenges that impede IT’s ability to create business value.

A Dynatrace-commissioned survey affirms this paradox:

• 89% of CIOs say digital transformation has accelerated.
• 58% predict this pace will continue speeding up in the months ahead.
• 93% say IT’s ability to maximize business value is hindered by challenges like siloed business and IT teams.
• 16% of an IT team’s time is spent meeting with the business to identify the causes of and solutions to problems, costing organizations an average of $1.7 million annually in lost productivity.

As the qualitative analysis of the survey shows, traditional operating models with siloed BizDevOps teams and disparate monitoring and management solutions are proving ineffective and inadequate for cloud native architectures. As a result, IT teams can waste countless hours manually stitching together disparate data as part of a reactive effort to chase down and remediate problems. This painstaking process comes at the cost of time and resources that could be spent more meaningfully on collaborative and innovative work, as shown above.

Digital Transformations Accelerate, but Siloed DevOps Teams Remain Costly

There are two kinds of silos within organizations that are hindering IT teams’ ability to maximize value for the business: operational silos that calcify around the teams themselves, and data silos that naturally emerge from using different monitoring solutions.

How prevalent are these problems?

Forty-nine percent of CIOs say their IT and business teams operate in silos. This lack of cross-team collaboration makes it significantly more difficult for organizations to quickly and accurately identify severe performance issues and take remedial actions to mitigate their impact. Additionally, a lack of cross-team collaboration has negative effects across the board, from DevSecOps and AIOps to cloud infrastructure monitoring, digital experience management and leveraging business analytics for improved outcomes. When IT and business teams are not on the same page and do not work in tandem toward shared goals, they end up working at cross purposes. As a result, you have IT teams that are bogged down in inefficiencies, wasting time in war rooms and pointing fingers whenever something goes wrong.

At the same time, IT teams are facing unprecedented levels of workload pressures. Nearly half of CIOs describe their IT teams as more thinly stretched than ever. This lack of resources limits their insights into, and observability of, user experiences and how an organization’s digital services are performing. Sadly, this status quo is only going to get worse, with nearly nine in 10 acknowledging that digital transformation has accelerated over the last 12 months and will only continue to pick up pace in the future.

The rush to digitize without the resources in place thus has significant cost consequences for the business, too. As mentioned above, organizations are losing, on average, $1.7 million annually in lost productivity, owed to the time teams waste identifying both the causes of and solutions to problems impacting business outcomes.

Breaking Down Silos with Cross-Team BizDevOps Collaboration

As digital transformation accelerates and modern dynamic cloud environments become more complex, there is a greater need for IT teams to work together to make data-driven decisions that drive the business forward. The silos that business, development, and operations teams coalesce into have made this collaboration nearly impossible.

Eliminating these silos requires organizations to transform the way teams work. Currently, only 14% of CIOs say their organization utilizes a single platform that enables cross-team collaboration and visibility into IT’s impact on business outcomes. For the 86% of organizations who haven’t adopted a single platform approach yet, the path forward lies through adopting BizDevOps processes and autonomous cloud operations – all to bring BizDevOps teams onto the same page, operating from a single source of truth, and driving toward the same goals with united, rather than competing, efforts.

The traditional “my part works fine approach is wasting hundreds of hours and millions of dollars every year. Three-quarters of CIOs say they’re frustrated with trying to piece together data that has been collected across multiple monitoring tools, just in order to get a sense of what impact their IT investments are having on the business. Furthermore, limited collaboration across BizDevOps prevents IT from responding quickly to sudden changes in business needs, leaving them unable to keep up with the pace of digital transformation and multicloud complexity. This results in wasted efforts and expenses due to a lack of cross-team visibility.

Organizations can overcome these challenges by embracing a more collaborative and holistic business model, underpinned by a unified approach to monitoring and management across multiple teams and multiple disciplines such as AIOps, user experience, security and cloud infrastructure. Adopting a single platform approach to monitoring and management empowers teams with real-time insights into their environments. Those insights, in turn, enable BizDevOps to make more efficient use of resources, spend more time on true innovation rather than manual firefighting, drive improved business outcomes and maximize the value of IT for the business in the long run.

Feature image via Pixabay.