The survey of 153 executives, which IDG Research conducted on Unisys’ behalf, reveals that respondents view enterprise-scale agility as the key to realising closer and better engagement with customers, which they view as the most important potential outcome of adopting digital business models throughout their organisations.
“Our research shows executives’ growing appreciation of the need for consistent, integrated, enterprise-wide digital capabilities that act as one to fulfill customers’, partners’ and internal users’ demands,” said Bob West, vice president, Global Application Services, Unisys. “The more broadly organisations can adopt new approaches to scaling agility in deploying a business-critical application environment, the better they will be able to realise the full benefits of digital business.”
Improving Customer Experience Is Paramount Goal of Digital Business
Almost three-quarters (73 percent) of respondents say that it is important to implement application agility strategies in the service of digital transformation, although only about one-fifth (18 percent) view doing so as critically important.
Two top benefits of digital business transformation respondents cite involve improving the customer experience, and respondents indicate that their organisations are on the way to substantial progress in achieving that goal:
· 84 percent say that digital transformation can enhance customer engagement and lead to exceeding expectations to the point of “delight.” In fact, 44 percent of those respondents view achieving such an outcome as critical and rate their organisation’s progress toward achieving it as excellent or very good.
· 79 percent see better connection and reach with customers, especially mobile ones, as a primary benefit of digital business transformation. Forty (40) percent view it as critical, and 48 percent rate their organisation’s progress toward achieving this goal as excellent or very good.
The respondents overwhelmingly consider the cloud to be the primary means of driving agility across the application environment. Seventy-six (76) percent take that view, versus 52 percent who consider implementing a modern application architecture as the primary route to enterprise agility.
Agile Adoption Accelerating, with DevOps as a Key Enabler
Sixty-one (61) percent of respondents say that their organisations plan to increase adoption of enterprise agile frameworks over the next 12 to 24 months, with the highest commitment among larger organisations: 72 percent of respondents from organisations with 500 or more developers project increased agile adoption.
However, the respondents are clear-eyed about the potential challenges to achieving agility across the application environment, citing data security concerns/requirements (62 percent) and scaling agile culture and processes across the enterprise (52 percent) as key challenges they face.
The study also shows that respondents view DevOps as a key enabler for enterprise-scale agility. DevOps involves close collaboration between development and operations functions based on the automation of key processes; efficient, cloud-based access to development technologies via platform as a service (PaaS) and application platform as a service (aPaaS); and use of enterprise-agile frameworks, such as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®).
Eighty-four (84) percent of the respondents say that their organisation will have some level of DevOps adoption in the next 12 to 24 months, with 38 percent having already adopted the methodology, 29 percent planning to do so and the remaining 17 percent in the evaluation stage.
Nearly half (49 percent) of respondents in organisations with 500 or more developers say that they have adopted DevOps, and more than one-third (37 percent) in that large-scale group still plan to do so.
Respondents say that innovation, cutting time to deployment and application quality are the top three factors, respectively, driving consideration of DevOps. Eighty-three (83) percent anticipate that it will enable them to spend less time and resources on resolving problems and more time on innovation, 81 percent believe that DevOps can improve responsiveness to business requests for system changes and 80 percent anticipate that it will improve application/service quality and performance in production.
DevOps could also prove to be the solution to organisations’ concerns about creating and maintaining a secure environment for enterprise agility. One hundred (100) percent of respondents say that their organisations have adopted or are planning to adopt DevOps to ensure better collaboration between security and DevOps professionals, and 95 percent say that they are adopting DevOps to build consistent and automated procedures to limit risk and address vulnerabilities.
Unisys Application Services are designed to serve enterprises’ entire application lifecycle needs, from inception to retirement. Intelligent data analytics predict and resolve potential problems before they become incidents. The services – including developing new applications and helping clients migrate legacy applications to cloud and mobile environments – are designed to create the most optimised user experience and deliver on the demands of a secure, digitally enabled enterprise.
