Making Sense of IT Perceptions and Realities

IT strategy

Making Sense of IT Perceptions and Realities

Solution providers should not only be aware of what customers perceive as their IT challenges but also understand what their actual operations issues are.

Major Business Challenges

Top challenges included standardizing and streamlining business processes (34%), too many manual processes (33%) and keeping up with demand for app development (31%).

Most Important Changes Needed

Among the most important changes needed were streamlining operational processes (56%), followed by increasing standardization (38%), moving away from legacy systems (37%) and changing operational skills/roles (35%).

The Failure to Communicate

70% of IT decision-makers feel the ability to link IT investments to key business outcomes is critical/very important. When making IT decisions, a full 68% said business goals take a higher priority over IT operational goals. But 47% believe their organizations are doing an excellent or very good job of communicating and demonstrating the impact of IT investments.

Factors Affecting IT Strategy

What affects IT strategy? Nearly two-thirds (65%) cited heightened risk of security breaches, followed by stricter compliance/regulatory mandates (43%), greater end-user expectations (41%) and smaller IT budgets (39%).

Major IT Investment Considerations

70% cited security—followed by improving customer experience (59%), managing costs (59%) and boosting operational efficiency (52%)—as key IT investment considerations.

Importance of IT Security Today vs. Two Years Ago

Three-quarters (75%) said improving IT security is more important today compared with two years ago. Meanwhile, 51% cited managing costs, 49% the need to mitigate risks and 49% improving customer experience as being more important.

Top Strategic Initiatives

Among the leading initiatives, Agile development and process automation tied, at 22%—followed by migration to IT as a service (21%), converged data center infrastructure (20%) and cloud/virtualization management (18%).

Perceived Greatest Amount of IT Difficulty

Perception of IT difficulty can be daunting. Security tops the list, at 44%, followed by IT governance and compliance management, at 29%.

Greatest Actual Amount of IT Difficulty

Regarding actual difficulty, process automation tops the list, at 49%, followed by application performance management, at 37%.

Most Difficult Parts of an IT Project

Planning, at 41%, was cited as the most difficult stage; following that were build (36%), test (32%) and run (25%).