Mind the gap, all five months of it. That’s the message that emerged from a recent survey for VMware which revealed IT takes an average of five months to deliver on business demands. The survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne, also found that 80% of IT managers in the UK thought there was a significant gap between what business managers wanted and what IT could deliver.
In a quarter of cases, the five month gap was viewed as unduly optimistic, with IT departments admitting it could take anywhere from seven to 18 months for them to deliver what the business was asking for.
The survey polled 1,800 IT decision makers and 3,600 office workers in companies with more than 100 employees in a number of European and middle eastern countries. While companies in Ireland were not included, there’s very little reason why their experience should deviate significantly from the overall findings.
Of those surveyed in the UK, for example, 51% thought the consequences of the gap between business demands and IT delivery would reduce the likelihood of innovation across all departments, 52% suggested it reduced staff productivity and over a third (35%) were concerned they would lose customers to more agile competitors.
To many, the five month gap might seem an unduly short time period. Certainly, VMware CTO EMEA Joe Baguley wondered whether the figure was “too optimistic” at VMware’s recent vForum event in London. Even so, that didn’t stop him from painting a rather dramatic picture of the consequences of the technology gap, when he commented on the survey. “A lag of almost half a year between what the business expects of IT and what it can deliver is huge,” he argued.
Investment shift
The implication for IT was that it needed to find ways to try and bridge that gap even as it balanced the need to get the most value out of existing systems with the need to deploy new technologies. “We’re hearing time and time again that businesses see IT as a driver of innovation; it has to be part of the future, not part of the furniture,” Baguley stated. “Organisations of all sizes need an IT infrastructure that can scale up and down with business demand, increase automation to reduce management burden and help improve productivity and support innovation. Investment needs to shift so that IT can genuinely impact the business and reduce the gap.”
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