Software intelligence company, Dynatrace, today announced the findings of an independent global survey of 249 CIOs in the financial services sector, which reveals that 77% of financial services organizations say the need for speed in digital innovation is putting customer experience at risk. The study found that on average, financial services organizations release new software updates twice per working hour, as they push to keep up with competitive pressures and soaring consumer expectation. 

Looking ahead, 90% of financial services CIOs said they will need to release updates even faster in the future. However, the speed of releases can come at a cost. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of these financial services CIOs admitted they are forced to compromise between faster innovation and the need to ensure customers have a great software experience.

“Every organization on the planet is a software company these days, including financial services organizations. Market leaders are releasing multiple software updates every second to enhance customer experience. Consequently, the modern approach to delivering software is about agile, fast development cycles and releasing into dynamic, hybrid multi-cloud environments,” said Andreas Grabner, DevOps Activist, Dynatrace. “Yet end users also expect the steady flow of new features and updates to work perfectly, without compromise. The challenge for financial services IT teams is to deliver fast, while moving to a cloud native architecture and maintaining user experience.”

The new CIO survey looks at the pains organizations face as they strive for new heights of agility and speed. Key findings include:

Cloud enables agility but financial services CIOs struggle with:

• Ensuring software performance isn’t negatively impacted (69%)
• Identifying if moving an application to the cloud has delivered the desired benefits (57%)
• Understanding if an application is well-suited to the cloud (57%)
• Re-architecting legacy applications for the cloud (51%)
• Ensuring the user-experience isn’t impacted during the migration process (52%)

Lack of collaboration and visibility leads to innovation delays:

• 78% of financial services CIOs said their organization has experienced IT project delays that could have been prevented if development and operations teams were able to easily collaborate
• Financial services CIOs said digital transformation initiatives were most frequently derailed by:
  • IT outages caused by external issues (56%)
  • IT outages caused by internal changes (49%)
  • Rectifying bad code that has been pushed through the pipeline (41%)

Financial service organizations face challenges as they turn to DevOps to improve collaboration:

• 74% of financial services organizations have implemented or are exploring the possibilities of a DevOps culture to improve collaboration and drive faster innovation
• 77% of financial services CIOs said that DevOps efforts are often being undermined by the absence of shared data and tools, which makes it difficult for IT teams to obtain a single view of ‘the truth’
• 59% of financial services CIOs identified differences in priorities between departmental siloes as an additional barrier to DevOps adoption

“The challenge for all financial services organizations is to get a holistic view of the DevOps pipeline – from code to experience. As DevOps has matured, enterprises are looking to automate and integrate their software development to release faster, with higher quality, and with less manual effort. It’s exciting to see AI play an even greater role in reducing manual tasks, so we can do what we love – write better software, deploy with speed, and deliver perfect software experiences,” adds Grabner.

This report, commissioned by Dynatrace, is based on a global survey of 249 CIOs in the financial services sector in large enterprises with over 1,000 employees, conducted by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by Dynatrace.