BT Digital transforms service operations with Dynatrace to drive improved customer experience

BT is undergoing a major company-wide digital transformation, with the goal of delivering excellent customer experiences and creating innovative products and services. To drive this transformation, BT’s Digital unit is migrating the Group’s critical applications to a modern multicloud technology stack built on AWS and Google Cloud, and creating a unified service management capability, with ServiceNow at the core.However, the move to a cloud-native architecture introduced complexity across BT’s IT services environment. The BT Digital team relied on 16 disparate monitoring tools to maintain visibility into the end-to-end technology stack. This made it difficult to identify the root cause of performance issues quickly, so they could be resolved before customer journeys were affected. As a result, it was challenging to deliver the customer experience excellence that BT was striving for.

A three-phase transformation

BT Digital realized it needed to revolutionize service operations across the Group to achieve its goals. Its teams required a consolidated view across the end-to-end technology environment, with real-time visibility into the user journey to enable proactive and predictive service optimization. After evaluating the market, BT identified Dynatrace as the best fit, due to its ability to automate issue detection and consolidate all application monitoring capabilities onto a single platform.

“We identified three key phases for our transformation at BT,” comments Alex Bell, Chief Architect for BT Enterprise. “First, we needed to transform digital operations to modernize our processes and services, driven by the move to the cloud. Second, we wanted to embrace AIOps to automate issue detection and analysis, so we could overcome the complexity of a modern operating environment. We saw the unique combination of Dynatrace and ServiceNow as invaluable in providing that capability, through more intelligent, simplified, and automated service operations. Finally, our vision is to work towards a third phase of achieving self-healing systems by 2025, using Dynatrace and ServiceNow to automate the resolution of issues, as well as finding the root cause.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Unified observability – Dynatrace provides a single source of truth across BT’s end-to-end technology stack. This is enabling BT Digital to replace 16 legacy monitoring tools with one unified platform, supporting its drive towards cumulative cost savings of £28m by 2027
• Real-time answers – Dynatrace’s automated issue detection capabilities enable anomalies to be identified in real time, and its AI engine provides precise answers that reveal the root cause instantly. This has helped to reduce MTTI (mean time to investigate) by up to 90%, meaning problems can be intercepted and resolved before the customer is impacted.
• More successful launches – Dynatrace’s AIOps capabilities provide a deeper understanding of the performance of BT’s digital services, so its teams can see where they can be proactively optimized to enhance customer journeys. The latest iPhone launch demonstrated the full impact of these benefits, as BT enjoyed its most stable major product release ever.
• Enhanced productivity – The automation enabled by Dynatrace is helping BT Digital to double the productivity of its teams, by allowing them to focus on tasks where they can deliver the greatest value to the Group and its customers. This will become even more pronounced as it begins the third phase of its digital transformation, with the move towards a zero ops model, underpinned by self-healing capabilities.

“Dynatrace was light years ahead of any other solution in its space,” continued Bell. “It provided instant value through its ability to identify issues in real time, instead of 30 minutes after the fact. With Dynatrace, we can understand the experience our customers are getting from us during the moment of their interaction. We can then spot any anomalies and detect way back in the underlying infrastructure or code layer what the root cause of those problems might be. That gives us the ability to intercept and resolve issues before customers start to see any impact on their experience. All of these benefits enable our teams to concentrate on the core objective of our digital transformation; creating industry-leading customer journeys.”