Almost half (40 percent) of IT professionals describe the current capability of their departments to do their jobs as "stretched" or "overstretched" according to a new survey by ManageEngine.
When asked what was holding their department back from working more efficiently, an overwhelming 36 percent stated budget constraints, followed by resourcing constraints and limitations on team skills (24 percent and 20 percent, respectively).
Not surprisingly, when asked to describe their current IT budgets, around a third (34 percent) of the respondents claimed their budgets were "stretched" or "inadequate".
Interestingly, a noticeable disconnect becomes apparent when looking at the spending priorities of the IT department compared to that of the boardroom. If given free reign over the IT budget spend, the majority (58 percent) of IT departments would prioritize long-term, back-end infrastructure investment, with virtualization solutions (24 percent) and additional storage (18 percent) topping the wish list. Whereas the boardroom is pushing for more immediate and visible priorities driven by end-user demands such as upgrades of productivity software - e.g., Office - being the top priority at 20 percent.
With this in mind, when asked what is holding the IT department back from making its preferred investment, budget holder priorities (58 percent) and influence from the boardroom (20 percent) came out on top. Digging further into this disconnect with the boardroom, the survey found that a huge, 44 percent of respondents claimed lack of technological awareness at the board level stops the IT pros from communicating the needs of the IT department effectively. Only 8 percent of the respondents cited their own lack of appropriate business acumen as an issue.
When looking into where the IT department spends a majority of its current time, 30 percent stated rolling out new solutions. Other top responses included responding to, and dealing with, end-user admins (20 percent) and troubleshooting queries (18 percent). The bottom of the list included rolling out company-wide policies (18 percent) and software updates (14 percent).
"The disconnect between the IT department and the boardroom has always been an issue, but this survey highlights that as budgets become more stretched, this disconnect will have an increasing effect on the overall business," said David Howell, European Director, ManageEngine. "Overlooking an IT department's priorities, such as back-end improvements, is not only detrimental to the department's time, but also impacts the efficiency of the business as a whole. The focus on tactical fire-fighting activities, over more strategic, long-term actions, exacerbates this problem even further. Being able to communicate with the boardroom effectively will continue to be a crucial skill for the IT department. In the meantime, using cost-effective and agile IT solutions will help alleviate stretched capacity and utilize budgets more effectively."
About the Survey: The survey was conducted amongst delegates attending the Service Desk and IT Support Show, Earls Court, London. 100 UK IT professionals were surveyed at the event held April 29-30, 2014.
The Latest
The journey of maturing observability practices for users entails navigating peaks and valleys. Users have clearly witnessed the maturation of their monitoring capabilities, embraced DevOps practices, and adopted cloud and cloud-native technologies. Notwithstanding that, we witness the gradual increase of the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) for production issues year over year ...
Optimizing existing use of cloud is the top initiative — for the seventh year in a row, reported by 62% of respondents in the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report ...
Gartner highlighted four trends impacting cloud, data center and edge infrastructure in 2023, as infrastructure and operations teams pivot to support new technologies and ways of working during a year of economic uncertainty ...
Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software ...
As SLOs grow in popularity their usage is becoming more mature. For example, 82% of respondents intend to increase their use of SLOs, and 96% have mapped SLOs directly to their business operations or already have a plan to, according to The State of Service Level Objectives 2023 from Nobl9 ...
Observability has matured beyond its early adopter position and is now foundational for modern enterprises to achieve full visibility into today's complex technology environments, according to The State of Observability 2023, a report released by Splunk in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group ...
Before network engineers even begin the automation process, they tend to start with preconceived notions that oftentimes, if acted upon, can hinder the process. To prevent that from happening, it's important to identify and dispel a few common misconceptions currently out there and how networking teams can overcome them. So, let's address the three most common network automation myths ...
Many IT organizations apply AI/ML and AIOps technology across domains, correlating insights from the various layers of IT infrastructure and operations. However, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has observed significant interest in applying these AI technologies narrowly to network management, according to a new research report, titled AI-Driven Networks: Leveling Up Network Management with AI/ML and AIOps ...
When it comes to system outages, AIOps solutions with the right foundation can help reduce the blame game so the right teams can spend valuable time restoring the impacted services rather than improving their MTTI score (mean time to innocence). In fact, much of today's innovation around ChatGPT-style algorithms can be used to significantly improve the triage process and user experience ...
Gartner identified the top 10 data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2023 that can guide D&A leaders to create new sources of value by anticipating change and transforming extreme uncertainty into new business opportunities ...