CIOs look to AI to solve IT complexity: report

Eighty per cent of Australian CIOs say AI will be critical to IT’s ability to master increasing IT complexity, according to a global study of 800 CIOs.

According to the Dynatrace report – which interviewed 50 Australian CIOs – 80 per cent of Australian CIOs are concerned that rising IT complexity could soon make it extremely difficult to manage performance efficiently and effectively.

Digital transformation, migration to the enterprise cloud and increasing customer demands are creating a surge in IT complexity and the associated costs of managing it, according to the report, 2019 global report ‘Top Challenges for CIOs in a Software-Driven, Hybrid, Multi-Cloud World.’

“As complexity grows beyond IT teams’ capabilities, the economics of throwing more manpower at the problem no longer works,” said Dynatrace founder and CTO Bernd Greifeneder. “Organisations need a radically different AI approach.

According to the report, Australian CIOs’ biggest concerns if IT performance becomes too difficult to manage includes the following: inability to provide a good customer experience (68 per cent); impact on company reputation (45 per cent); lost revenue (43 per cent); threat to the existence of our business (53 per cent); impact on customers’ livelihoods (43 per cent); and impact on public services (43 per cent).

The study also finds that Australian businesses have suffered an average of six IT outages where user-experiences, business revenues or operations were impacted in the last 12 months.

It also reveals that 78 per cent of Australian organisations don’t have complete visibility into the performance of applications in cloud native architectures.

Ninety per cent of Australian CIOs say increasing complexity and the challenges of keeping a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) up to date in real time is making service management more difficult.

The report also finds that 86 per cent of Australian CIOs say monitoring the performance of micro-services in real-time is almost impossible, while 84 per cent of Australian CIOs find it a frustration that IT teams have to spend time setting-up monitoring for different cloud environments/providers when deploying new services and have an average of 12 monitoring tools deployed.

Additionally, Australian CIOs say an average of 34 per cent of IT teams’ time is spent tackling digital performance problems, while the average organisational overhead for dealing with performance problems is $2.87 million, up 21 per cent from 2018.