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A survey conducted by eMedia on behalf of Centrix Software found business organizations are unaware of the full potential of IT infrastructure. According to the survey, knowing how frequently an application is being used from a company’s IT infrastructure is a challenge for most IT managers: 54 percent of respondents could give this information but with some difficulty, while 22 percent found this extremely difficult or impossible to achieve. Only 24 percent of respondents found it easy to provide this information on application usage.
Similarly, the ability to measure the true cost of application delivery across an organization’s entire estate is an issue for IT professionals, particularly in larger companies, with more than three quarters of respondents stating it would be difficult for them to achieve this. Of the respondents, 31 percent said that they would find it extremely difficult or impossible to measure their costs; 45 percent said it was somewhat difficult; only 24 percent of those surveyed said it would be easy to provide this information. The survey included 194 respondents across a variety of markets and company sizes.
“The results of this survey show that many organizations don’t have the tools in place to know if their IT investments are delivering the maximum amount of value to their business, or whether they are continuing down a path that will ultimately cost them more than they thought,” said Centrix CEO Lisa Hammond. “Many businesses harbor unnecessary costs due to -software sprawl,’ the misallocation of resources, over-licensing on software or not taking the most efficient path to delivering IT. By having the ability to track and monitor their application usage, immediate cost savings could be made without affecting performance.”
Hammond said the lack of visibility is driven in part by the complexity of system ownership and decision-making, and having a clear picture of how IT is used across the business is essential for smart investments and planning, as well as modeling how changes to strategy would affect service delivery and cost.
“Applying a -business intelligence’ approach to IT enables IT departments to prioritize not only where cost reductions can be achieved, but also where budgets should be allocated to achieve further results in the future,” she said.
By using IT intelligence tools, Hammond said a lean approach to IT can be developed, and the business can establish the real financial metrics and consumption measurements that are needed for strategic financial and business planning. “Companies that undertake IT projects without having a thorough understanding of how their environment truly works will more often than not pay the price later with projects running overtime, not being adopted by users or by investing in unsuitable technology approaches,” she warned.