CIOs blame siloed IT teams and tools for misalignment

A recent study has highlighted the extent to which CIOs and IT leaders are struggling to fix business-related IT issues.

The Vanson Bourne global survey of 700 CIOs, for Dynatrace’s How to transform the way teams work to improve collaboration and drive better business outcomes study, reported that IT leaders have growing concerns about their ability to keep up with digital transformation. 

According to the survey, CIOs estimate that on average, IT teams spend more than 16% of their time in meetings with the business, to identify the cause and solution to business problems. This equates to $1.7m per year, or 12.5 hours a week.

The study reported that the majority of organisations’ IT departments consist of multiple teams focused on designing, building, deploying and running the software the business and its customers rely on. Often, these teams each use a variety of tools to monitor and manage everything from application and infrastructure performance, to user experience, conversions and revenue. As a result, there’s no single and consistent source of truth.

The study found that 40% of CIOs admitted there was a greater level inefficiency in IT departments due to time wasted in war rooms or different teams playing the blame game. A further 40% said this made it more difficult to identify the severity of an issue and minimise the overall business impact.

For 39% of the CIOs who took part in the study, the inconsistency of data collected across multiple tools meant it was harder to understand whether the IT stack was delivering the service levels anticipated or required for business success.

Over a third of CIOs (36%) admitted that the inability to fully understand what the business and customers need made it difficult to maximise the business value of IT.

The study concluded that traditional IT operating models with siloed teams and multiple monitoring and management tools are proving ineffective at keeping up with cloud-native architectures. This means that teams waste time manually combining data from disparate tools in a reactive effort to solve challenges instead of focusing on driving innovation. 

To maintain productivity, meet customer demands and keep up with the competition, Dynatrace recommended that organisations transform the way their teams work – enabling them to innovate faster, collaborate more efficiently and deliver greater business value. It urged IT leaders to break down the silos between IT and the business, and bring their teams together with a single, unifying language that enables more effective collaboration.

“As the pace of digital transformation accelerates, and modern, dynamic clouds introduce increasing complexity, the pressure on teams to make data-driven business decisions and automate operations to deliver business value faster has never been greater,” said Mike Maciag, chief marketing officer at Dynatrace.

“However, a lack of cross-team collaboration and access to a single source of truth across the organisation is hindering BizDevOps teams’ ability to achieve this. By using disparate data from multiple monitoring and analytics solutions, and adhering to a ‘my-part-works-fine’ view, they are wasting hundreds of hours and millions of dollars every year, rather than pursuing shared business goals backed by precise, holistic insight.”