Continuous innovation a cause of pain

A report released by Avantra, a leading AIOps and automation platform for SAP, and research partner ASUG reveals organizations are spending more than twice as much time executing on their current strategies than planning for the future.

To better understand the digital transformation and innovation needs of SAP customers, ASUG conducted an independent survey commissioned by Avantra. The survey aimed to: 

• Identify innovation drivers in the SAP operations market,
• Understand SAP-centric enterprise operational challenges,
• Explore challenges in digital transformation, and
• Uncover the tools and technologies enterprise leaders need to solve these challenges.

Of these goals, key findings from the study revealed:

• Organizations are spending more than twice as much time executing current strategies (67%) than planning for the future (33%), 
• The number of self-identified innovators (organizations that spend more of their time innovating than executing) is only 13%, while the number of self-identified executor organizations is 67%; and
• 74% of respondents rate their IT operations department as somewhat or extremely willing to adopt new technologies. 

“At one point, implementing SAP was the very definition of innovation and digital transformation; however the cost of keeping these systems running has become a major cost for many organizations,” says John Appleby, Chief Executive Officer at Avantra. “The findings from this report show that it is imperative that companies use automation to drive down the cost of running enterprise software so they can become more agile, innovative and deliver business value,” Appleby adds.

The SAP landscape, over the last few years, has become increasingly complex making it a major factor when it comes to organizations spending more time trying to 'keep the lights on' rather than innovating and driving business transformation.

“It’s clear that the SAP customers who participated in this study are committed to delivering the value of innovation to their organizations. But we learned that they struggle with the complexity of maintaining those systems, along with constraints such as a lack of resources to run their SAP environments. We not only identified the factors that are holding these customers back, but also the factors that are propelling some organizations toward achieving their innovation goals,” adds Ann Marie Gray, Vice President of Content Strategy and Research, ASUG.