The cost of poor IT

CloudTalent, a leading global IT consultancy, has published new findings that reveal how private sector firms in the UK waste approximately £74,000 each year – because they spend 52 percent of their time fixing poor IT infrastructure, rather than innovating.

  • Friday, 28th March 2014 Posted 10 years ago in by Phil Alsop

The ‘Stitch in Time’ Report has been independently commissioned by Cloudtalent to reveal the issues that private sector firms are facing in the digital age. The report also revealed that two million business leaders in the UK admit to knowing what ‘cloud computing’ is, but have no idea on how to embrace it for their business.


Adrian Overall, CEO of CloudTalent, who commissioned the report commented on the findings:
“These figures are not a surprise to us – we actually expected them to be slightly higher – across the board. We’re not talking about small firms here either, firms with 1000 or more employees are struggling from day to day with poor IT systems – wasting millions of pounds.


“One problem that affects at least 15 percent of businesses is the issue of the hype cycle that the IT industry creates – a lot of companies buy systems that are too advanced for what they need, meaning they lose control very quickly, or systems that are not designed to scale and grow with their business. It’s a problem for a lot of businesses, but it can easily be avoided if requirements are engineered correctly upfront.”


The report also revealed that 52 percent of the average IT team’s time is spent fixing problems, rather than improving or innovating, despite 63 percent of business leaders saying IT infrastructure is the most important aspect of their business, coming second only to staff.


Dr Richard Sykes, an independent advisor in strategic transformation of technology and business process, and Chair of the UK Cloud Industry Forum provided the foreword for the report. He said:
“What a wake-up call for UK businesses. Across the patch IT is seen as unreliable, a practical reality that is costing businesses and their staff real loss of productivity, effectiveness and efficiency – management distracted, reputations weakened, money stolen from the bottom line on a pretty grand scale.


How the capabilities of modern IT are put to work for us to exploit are in a state of very real and potentially beneficial flux. The over-exploited marketing label of ‘the Cloud’ hides the impact of major operational innovation in the consumerisation of IT: the worlds of e-commerce, SMS &Texting, Apps & the Internet ‘on the mobile’..., setting new standards of reliability, flexibility, ease of sourcing & low costs.