Solving digital problems takes too long

Resolving incidents that impact consumers takes IT teams approximately double the amount of time customers are willing to wait for a service that isn't performing properly, according to a new study.

The research by digital operations management company PagerDuty surveyed over 300 IT personnel in development and operations as well as over 300 consumers in order to identify the challenges of meeting customer expectations.

Nearly 70 percent of consumer respondents say that they will leave a digital app or service in under 15 minutes or less if it is unresponsive or slow. But on the other side of the coin, more than a third of IT respondents report that it takes an average of 30 minutes or longer to resolve these issues.

The survey also finds IT professionals' perception of their organizations' readiness to deploy, manage and maintain digital services doesn’t align with the high frequency of consumer-facing IT incidents they currently face. Of the nearly 84 percent of IT personnel who claim to be confident their organization is well-prepared to support digital services, more than half experience customer-impacting incidents (slowness or downtime) at least once a week.

Many respondents say their top digital operations challenges are tied to increased complexity, which results in more cognitive load, and the proliferation of IT tools used to manage digital services.

"As consumer usage of digital services continues to increase and competition among businesses intensifies, the bar for IT performance rises in tandem," says Tim Armandpour, senior vice president of product development at PagerDuty. "To prepare for this new reality, it is critical that organizations employ the right digital operations strategies and begin narrowing the gap between IT performance and their customers' expectations of the digital experience."

In order to address the problem, IT professionals are adopting modern development methods and tools. DevOps practices are being used by 63.4 percent and incident management by 41.7 percent. Monitoring tools are key too, with 67.7 percent turning to security monitoring and 58.6 percent application monitoring.

The full 2017 State of Digital Operations Report is available for download on the PagerDuty website.

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