State of Digital Operations Report Reveals IT Challenges Resulting from the Rise of Digital Service in the UK

PagerDuty Survey Finds Strong Digital Operations Management Strategy Critical To Accelerate Digital Transformation

LONDON, ENGLAND – October 5, 2017 – PagerDuty, the global leader in Digital Operations Management, today released the findings of its State of Digital Operations Report: United Kingdom, which revealed the need for a shift in workforce expectations and the way teams across an organisation collaborate to resolve consumer-facing incidents. While the majority of IT practitioners believe their organisation is equipped to support digital services, over half of them also say they face consumer-impacting incidents at least one or more times a week, sometimes costing their organisations millions in lost revenue for every hour that an application is down. The report also highlighted that an organisation's failure to deliver on consumer expectations for a seamless digital experience can greatly affect a company’s brand reputation and bottom line.

The report findings are based on a two-part survey of over 300 IT practitioners and over 300 UK consumers on the impact of digital services. The surveys specifically examined what UK consumers expect from digital experiences, how organisations are investing in supporting digital services and what tools IT teams are using to keep these services up and running.

The State of Digital Operations report found that nearly all (90.6 percent) of UK consumers surveyed use a digital application or service to complete tasks such as banking, making dinner reservations, finding transportation, grocery shopping and booking airline tickets, at least one or more times a week. This finding is indicative of the larger UK digital services landscape—IDC predicts that half of the Global 2000 enterprises will see the majority of their business depend on their ability to create and maintain digital services, products and applications by 2020. In addition, IDC says 89 percent of European organisations view digital transformation as central to their corporate strategy.

“With the rise in digital services in the UK, European businesses need to be ready to accelerate their digital transformation journey and adapt to consumer demands,” said Jennifer Tejada, CEO at PagerDuty. “Disrupting brand and engagement experience means lost revenue and organisations need to be proactive versus reactive––a reactive or automated approach to resolving consumer-facing incidents is not table stakes. Organisations can arm their IT teams by taking a holistic approach to incident response. Solutions that embrace capabilities such as machine learning and advanced response automation can help organisations easily deploy an expedited response to consumer-facing incidents.”

IT Cannot Meet Consumer Expectations

The State of Digital Operations report revealed that along with the heavy reliance on digital services, UK consumers expect a seamless user experience, and IT organisations are struggling to meet these expectations.

When a digital app or service is unresponsive or slow, many consumers indicated that they are quick to stop using that app or service.

  • 86.6 percent of surveyed consumers said they are likely to temporarily switch to an alternative mobile app or website to complete their task.
  • 81.2 percent of consumers said they would wait just one minute or less for a slow or unresponsive application before leaving to use a different app or service.
  • 66.8 percent of respondents said they were likely to never use a slow or unresponsive app or service again.

Meanwhile, 87.4 percent of IT personnel said their organisations take more than five minutes to resolve IT incidents that impact consumer-facing digital services, putting them at risk of losing users. The report also revealed that while 72.3 percent of IT practitioners believe their organisation is currently equipped to support digital service offerings effectively, 67.1 percent of IT organisations said they face consumer-impacting incidents at least one or more times a week. This places organisations at constant risk of losing customers and revenue due to the length of time it takes to resolve these issues.

The Effects of Downtime on the Bottom Line

IT teams are now at the front and center of providing customers with a satisfying user experience. The State of Digital Operations report revealed that organisations are making significant upfront investments in tools and technologies that support the delivery of digital services in order to avoid costly performance issues later on. Nearly half of respondents (49.9 percent) reported that their organisations budget £500,000 or more for DevOps and ITOps tools and services to support and manage digital service offerings––a critical investment as downtime or service degradation can significantly impact an organisation’s financial success.

  • Over one third of respondents (35.5 percent) said that on average, an hour of downtime costs their organisation between £500,000 to £5 million.
  • 14.3 percent indicated an hour of downtime costs £5 million or more.

IT disruptions aren’t just affecting the developers, DevOps or ITOps teams responsible for managing digital services performance––the State of Digital Operations report shows that the top three non-IT departments most impacted by software issues are:

  • Sales (35.2 percent)
  • Accounting and Finance (32.9 percent) and;
  • Research and Development (25.4 percent)

The Right Tools, Technologies and Strategy Make Digital Transformation Possible

The State of Digital Operations survey shows monitoring tools are important in helping organisations support digital service offerings effectively. The top three DevOps and ITOps tools used by IT teams to provide the insight needed to prevent disruptions in a customer’s digital experience are:

  • Security monitoring (51.1 percent)
  • Infrastructure monitoring (47.9 percent) and;
  • Application monitoring (41.4 percent)

“In order to fully embrace digital transformation, IT teams need streamlined tools and a tight digital operations strategy,” said Steve Barrett, head of EMEA Sales at PagerDuty. “By adopting and deploying the right tools, organisations can quickly and easily resolve problems before they are customer impacting, helping protect their revenue and reputation while delivering a seamless customer experience.”

The full 2017 State of Digital Operations UK report is available for download at PagerDuty Resources.

About PagerDuty

The PagerDuty® Digital Operations platform is the leading SaaS solution that empowers developers, DevOps, IT operations and business leaders to prevent and resolve business-impacting incidents for exceptional customer experience. More than 10,000 small, mid-size and enterprise global customers such as Comcast, Lululemon, IBM and Panasonic use and trust PagerDuty to maximize their time and increase their business response and efficiency. When revenue and brand reputation depends on customer satisfaction, PagerDuty arms businesses with the insight to proactively manage incidents and events that may impact customers across their IT environment. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company was recently listed in the 2016 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Inc. 500 and Forbes 2017 Cloud 100 lists. Try PagerDuty for free at www.pagerduty.com. Follow our blog and connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook.

Media Contact:

Celeste Malia, PagerDuty
celeste@pagerduty.com

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