Driven by a mission to innovate across the healthcare industry, the organisation identified an opportunity to reimagine their Sitecore Digital Experience Platform (DXP), enhancing backend functionality to improve performance and user experience of their website. They had shared infrastructure, where internal IT manage hosting and monitoring, while the Life Sciences division’s development team, embedded within marketing, handled feature development and deployment. Despite having a skilled team, IT’s primary focus was dedicated to enterprise systems meaning developers were often pulled into Sitecore DXP infrastructure challenges. This stretched their capacity thin, limiting their ability to drive forward innovation and enhance digital experiences.
Frequent Downtime: In 2023, the website experienced 20 days of downtime, with each incident lasting over an hour. The disruptions impacted user experience, limited customer engagement, and slowed business operations. Without a DXP focused proactive monitoring system, these issues were often discovered only after users reported them, leading to delayed responses.
Deployment Delays: With 169 days of tech freeze in 2023, the team were unable to deploy new technology, updates, or bug fixes. This meant that only 15 releases were completed throughout the year, limiting innovation and responsiveness to market needs.
Limited Internal DevOps: The development team found themselves covering the niche skills required to cover the specialised infrastructure tasks, including hosting configurations and deployments. This reduced time and focus for innovation and development tasks.
Sitecore Expertise: Developers frequently collaborated with IT teams on Sitecore-related infrastructure tasks. While this knowledge-sharing was valuable, it often shifted their focus away from building new features and optimizing the customer experience toward troubleshooting and resolving infrastructure-related tasks.