Singapore CIOs worry: Is IT becoming too complex to handle?

A fresh survey of 800 CIOs around the world by the software intelligence firm Dynatrace suggests that IT may soon reach a tipping point as it groans under the load of new technologies and sprawling digital initiatives.

Among the Singapore CIOs surveyed in Dynatrace’s 2019-20 Global CIO Report, 84 percent say increased complexity could soon make it extremely difficult to manage performance efficiently – and if they are unable to manage that performance, 62 percent see a threat to the existence of their business.

According to the Report, CIOs in Singapore feel increasing pressure as a result of digital transformation, customer demands, and migration to the public cloud. Reputational damage (55 percent) and lost revenue (52 percent) also emerged as key concerns among the Singaporean CIOs surveyed, as their businesses become software-driven and move to the cloud.

Despite these apprehensions, over the last 12 months, the city-state was below the global average in the number of IT outages where user experiences, business revenues, or operations were impacted (5 and 6 outages respectively).

The survey results highlight that IT teams in Singapore now spend 33 percent of their time tackling digital performance problems – an increase from 30 percent in 2018, costing businesses an average of US$3 million annually, compared to US$2.5 million in 2018 (an increase of 20 percent). This tracks with the global 33 percent average, similar to the US and lower than China (35 percent).

The cloud, which was supposed to reduce complexity, incurs its own problems. A full 86 percent of all Singaporean CIOs surveyed say they are frustrated so much time is spent setting up monitoring for different cloud environments when deploying new services. Most of them (80 percent) claim that they do not have complete visibility into application performance in cloud-native architectures.

To confront this growing IT complexity, 94 percent of Singapore CIOs (among the highest in the report) say that artificial intelligence will be critical to easing the burden. For many IT professionals, that assistance can’t arrive too soon.