IT drives the business

SolarWinds has released the results of its IT Trends Report 2015: Business at the Speed of IT, which demonstrates the significance of IT and IT’s ability to successfully adopt and implement new technology that drives business success. It also highlights the need to empower IT to overcome the challenge of delivering on the promise of these technologies and potential business impact in today’s increasingly hybrid environments. While 96 percent of IT professionals surveyed said adopting significant new technologies is important, many cited barriers to successful adoption that have resulted in achieving mixed results, such as budget (77 percent) and shortage of personnel (44 percent)—two key areas they also identified as top needs to feel more empowered.

“These findings highlight the vital role that IT and technology now play for today’s businesses. Businesses can only progress and perform as quickly as IT enables them to—it’s business at the speed of IT,” said Suaad Sait, executive vice president, products and markets, SolarWinds. “Empowering IT—especially to successfully adopt and implement new technologies quickly—should be a top priority for every organisation. This will become more important as we move further into the hybrid cloud era. The Cloud offers tremendous opportunity to streamline business and reduce costs, yet, as the study finds, three out of five organisations have migrated less than 25 percent of their infrastructure and about one in ten have not migrated anything. IT must be given the resources they need to make this transition. Otherwise their businesses may suffer.”

Key Findings

IT and IT’s ability to successfully adopt significant new technologies is critical to long-term business success. The new measures of IT performance are not just availability, reliability and uptime—but also business productivity, growth and profitability. However, barriers and challenges, including, for some, business leadership, continue to stall adoption and therefore business impact.

Nearly all—96 percent—of IT professionals who responded to the survey indicated that adopting significant new technologies is at least somewhat important to their organisation’s long-term success; of those, 42 percent said it is important and another 20 percent said it is extremely important
Budget limitations ranked as the top barrier to adopting those significant new technologies, followed by inability to convince decision makers of the need and/or benefit and concerns around disrupting business/end user performance, respectively
While 63 percent of survey-takers indicated they view their organisations’ CIO as an enabler in adopting significant new technologies, more than one-quarter said their CIO is either a barrier or uninvolved

Without empowering IT to effectively overcome these barriers, organisations struggle to achieve expected results from technology adoption within anticipated timeframes, and to ensure overall business-critical technology performance.

· More than half of IT professionals surveyed said it took longer than anticipated—24 percent said much longer—for the last significant new technology their organisation adopted to start impacting business and/or end-user efficiency
· Less than half of the survey-takers said their organisations’ last adoption of a significant new technology achieved expected return on investment within the projected timeframe; while more than one-third said it took longer than expected—13 percent of those said it took much longer
· Nearly 90 percent of respondents said their organisations’ end-users were negatively affected by a performance or availability issue with business-critical technology in the past 12 months; nearly a quarter of those reported that such issues occurred six times or more

To better empower IT to overcome these barriers and drive the success of their businesses through technology adoption, organisations must first provide IT with more resources, better training and development and greater autonomy.
· More than 40 percent of survey-takers said more resources, such as budget, personnel and time, ranked as their number one need to feel more empowered

· Stronger CIO support when liaising with other business leaders (31 percent), more or better strategic counsel and guidance from the CIO (29 percent), more or better training and development (26 percent), greater IT department autonomy (26 percent) rounded out the list of IT’s top five needs ranked number one by IT professionals surveyed

The annual SolarWinds IT Trends Report consists of survey-based research that explores significant trends, developments and movements related to and directly affecting IT and IT professionals. The findings of this year’s report are based on a survey fielded in December 2014, which yielded responses from 208 IT practitioners, managers and directors in the UK from small, mid-size and enterprise companies.