1.
The key findings of Digital Enterprise Journal's
research study based on insights from more than 800
organizations.
The final study will be published in August of 2019
The Roadmap to Becoming a Top
Performing Organization in Managing IT
Operations
Research study – key findings
Bojan Simic, President and Chief Analyst
Digital Enterprise Journal

2.
Key Objectives
Identify and
leverage best
practices
1
Take a holistic
approach to IT
Operations
2
Help create a
business case3 Identify measurable benefits that organizations
can expect from applying best practices
Provide actionable recommendations to end-
users by identifying and leveraging practices of
top performing organizations
Define a performance improvement roadmap by
using the approach that includes 4 key areas –
strategy, process, organization and technology
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

3.
Market Drivers Key market dynamics driving organizations to modernize their
IT Operations strategies and capabilities
Need to launch new
applications faster
Volume and velocity of
data and events to be
processed
Deployments of new types
of architectures and
infrastructures
58%
51%
43%
41%
Re-defined their IT
Operations
strategies over the
last 18 months
32
%
Deployments of
container based
architecture
46%
Deployments of
Cloud services
65%
55%
Higher customer expectations
for experience
Need to create a business
value from technology
deployments
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

4.
Key Challenges
64%Reported inability to
prevent performance
issues to be the key
challenge for IT
Operations
52%
Lack of capabilities
for real-time
management
61%
Time spent on
identifying the root
cause
48%
Scalability of
management
solutions
54%
Lack of visibility
into user
experience 46%
Management and
performance of
APIs
61%
Lack of actionable
context for
monitoring data
40% Learning curve for
IT Operations staff
52%
Inefficient process
for analyzing log
data
59%
Inability to correlate
data from different
domains
Alert and event
“noise”
73%Organizations are reporting, on
average, a 61% success rate in
preventing performance issues
before users are impacted
which is only a 6%
improvement since 2018.
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

5.
36%
Reported that
DevOps is taking a
lead role in some
traditional IT
Operations tasks
39%
Increase in LoB becoming a
part of the evaluation
process for IT Ops solutions
over the last 18 months.
34%
Of outages are
directly impacting
revenue
41%
Reported that
automating IT
Operations tasks is
no longer optional
71%
Increase of revenue loss
per 1 hour of downtime
over the last 18 months
18x
More data collected from
monitoring container based
vs. traditional environments
35%
Of incidents have 6 or
more FTEs involved
2.7x
Increase in amount of alerts
and events to be processed
over the last 2 years
By the Numbers
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

6.
Maturity
Framework
DEJ identified a class of top performing
organizations (TPO) which represents the top
20% of the survey pool.

7.
1 TPO class is defined with the
goal to identify practices of
these organizations that allow
them to outperform their peers
2
To provide recommendations to
"all other" organizations, DEJ
identified TPOs capabilities that
have the strongest impact on their
performance
3 All key TPO capabilities are
grouped in 4 categories -
Strategy, Process,
Organization and Technology
DEJ's research shows no correlation between companies' sizes, industry sectors or geographical location and their representation in the
TPO class
Top Performing Organizations
(20%)
All others
Percent of performance issues
that are proactively detected 79% 39%
Average Mean Time to
Resolution (MTTR) per incident 38 minutes 224 minutes (3.7 hours)
Percent of IT budgets available
for growth and innovation 51% 26%
Definition of Top Performing Organizations (TPO)
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

8.
Our analysis is centered around highlighting capabilities that are enabling these
organizations to outperform their peers and industry averages.
These capabilities are grouped in 4 categories – Strategy, Process, Organization and
Technology
Key Attributes of
Top Performing Organizations

9.
More likely to have customer experience as a
central focal point of IT
More likely to modify their strategy to meet specific
requirements of monitoring Cloud and microservices
More likely to put context of data in the core of
their IT Operations strategy
More likely to take the approach based on advanced
analytics, automation and data and knowledge
management concepts
More likely to have a well defined API
management strategy66%
Less likely to
experience
revenue
impacting
performance
incidents
4.2x
More users
managed per
IT FTE as
compared to
all others
2.2x
78%
62%
75%
2.6x
Attributes of TPOs - Strategy
As a result of having these strategies, TPOs are
more likely to report measurable benefits
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

10.
More likely to correlate IT performance and
business metrics
More likely to have the ability to predict
performance incidents
More likely to have a process for
prioritizing IT incidents
More likely to be selecting monitoring
solutions by predicting future amounts of
data to be processed
More likely to be deploying testing
processes that measure the impact on user
experience
More likely to automate processes for
launching new technologies and services
63%
More likely to
meet SLAs as
compared to all
others
5.1x
Faster new
application
releases as
compared to
all others
68%
2.4x
61%
84%
63%
59%
Attributes of TPOs - Process
As a result of having these processes in place, TPOs
are more likely to report measurable benefits
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

11.
More likely to be ensuring that multiple job roles
and departments gain value from IT data
More likely to educate IT staff on AIOps related skills
More likely to have enterprise wide initiative to evaluate
technologies based on the ability to contribute to business
outcomes
More likely to leverage a single platform for IT, Dev,
Security and IoT Ops
More likely to establish formal policies and
channels to enable DevOps initiatives
58%
Less trouble
tickets issued
as compared to
all others
69%
Faster
reaction to
unplanned IT
events as
compared to
all others
2.6x
52%
2.3x
1.7x
74%
Attributes of TPOs - Organization
As a result of these practices, TPOs are more
likely to report measurable benefits
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

12.
More likely to have capabilities for real-time
analysis of streaming data
More likely to have the ability to monitor
user experience at the point of interaction
with application
More likely to have capabilities for
automated remediation of performance
issues
More likely to have capabilities for
automated discovery of containers and
dependencies for microservices
More likely to have an automated process
for turning alerts into actionable events
More likely to have a notification system
that is based on context-driven automation
51%
Fewer
incidents
escalated as
compared to
all others
2x
Average
improvement
in relevancy of
alarms as
compared to
all others
74%
2.2x
66%
2.5x
52%
2.1x
Attributes of TPOs – Technology (1/2)
As a result of having these capabilities, TPOs are
more likely to report measurable benefits
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

13.
More likely to have capabilities for unified
analysis across IT management tools stack
More likely to have the ability to monitor the
impact of API performance on user
experience
More likely to be leveraging anomaly
detection capabilities for IT Operations
More likely to be using a single platform for
managing performance of on-premise and
Cloud services
More likely to have capabilities for
automated root cause analysis
More likely to have capabilities for
analyzing historical and real-time data
together
77%
65%
59%
88%
2.3x
52%
69%
More likely to
reduce
operating cost
for IT
Operations
2.6x
Higher
reduction in
Mean Time to
Detect
(MTTD) per
incident as
compared to
all others
Attributes of TPOs – Technology (2/2)
As a result of having these capabilities, TPOs are
more likely to report measurable benefits
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

14.
Summary of actions that organizations should be
taking to improve the performance and cost of
non acting
Key
Takeaways

15.
DEJ's research shows that the performance gap between TPO class and all other organizations is not only wide, but it is
trending to be wider each year. To start closing that gap, organizations should ensure that the following 6 areas are a part of
their IT Operations strategies.
Putting data in a context that is actionable, relevant and
aligned with business goals is a key step in closing the
performance gap with TPO class
1
Ability to scale up - for both present and future - should
be one of the key selection criteria when selecting IT
Operations solutions
2
Real-time visibility and taking a proactive approach for
managing IT Operations are key prerequisites for
achieving TPO performance levels
3
Organizations have to change their approach for
managing IT Operations to support new technologies,
infrastructure types and software architectures
4
Automation has become one of the key components of
IT Operations strategy, but organizations have to make
educated decisions about which processes they want to
automate
5
Monitoring the performance of IT services from the
perspective of the end-user does not have an
alternative
6
The cost of non acting is significantly increasing
every year and organizations need to have more
urgency when it comes to improving IT Operations
capabilities
Creating a business advantage is one of the key
drivers for top performing organizations to
modernize their IT Operations practices
Key Takeaways
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

16.
$2,129,000
Average estimated revenue
loss, per month, due to
performance related
slowdowns in application
release times
$10,700
Average IT labor cost per
performance incident
Analysis includes companies
with an average revenue
size of $227 million USD
$126,000
Average revenue lost due
to 1 hour of downtime.
The Cost of Not Acting
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

17.
Technology as a
Competitive
Advantage
Research-
analyst-media
fusion
Business
impact
analysis
Digital
Transformation
Journey
Situational
analysis
Ongoing
data
collection
Beyond
technology
“buckets”
About DEJ
Copyright © 2019 Digital Enterprise Journal

18.
Digital Enterprise Journal
Digital Enterprise Journal (DEJ) brings together the most advanced concepts from
analyst research and media industries. Our publications are driven by ongoing
survey research and their coverage spans across all major business-to-business
technologies.
DEJ operates as a subsidiary of Cognanta Inc. Cognanta is a research firm
dedicated to helping business professionals understand the impact of technology
deployments on their key goals.
Visit us at dej.cognanta.com