Retailers face innovation acceleration challenges, Dynatrace

74% of retail organisations say the need for speed in digital innovation is putting customer experience at risk. That’s according to a Dynatrace survey of 219 CIOs in the sector.

This also found that on average, retailers release new software updates twice per working hour, as they push to keep up with the likes of Amazon and soaring consumer expectation. 91% claim they will need to release updates even faster in the future. Other key findings include: 64% of CIOs admitted they are forced to compromise between faster innovation and customer experience; 78% said their organisation has experienced IT project delays that could have been prevented if IT teams could collaborate more easily; 68% of organisations have implemented or are exploring DevOps in this area. However, 74% stated that DevOps efforts are often being undermined by the absence of shared data and tools.

“Every organisation on the planet is a software company these days. Market leaders like Amazon are releasing multiple software updates every second. Consequently, the modern approach to delivering software is about agile, fast development cycles and releasing into dynamic, hybrid multi-cloud environments,” says Andreas Grabner, DevOps Activist, Dynatrace. “Yet shoppers also expect the steady flow of new e-commerce features and updates to work perfectly, without compromise. The challenge for retail IT teams is to deliver fast, while moving to a cloud native architecture and maintaining user experience.”

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