CIOs concerned about further IT 'consumerisation'

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 14 December 2011 15:11

IT Industry - Market

Many of Australia's CIOs are concerned that further consumerisation of IT will lead to greatly increased business risks and that the trend to consumerisation is already driving unrealistic expectations around the role of IT in enterprises.

A global survey of CIOs commissioned by Compuware and conducted by Vanson Bourne, examining the impact of new technology trends and models driven by business and end-user demands, reveals how applications and services delivered through models such as cloud computing and SaaS, as well as trends like the consumerisation of IT, social media and mobility, are exposing 'new performance blind spots' in IT management.

In Australia, 30 CIOs were surveyed, alongside 30 each in Italy, Benelux and Japan, and 100 CIOs each in the US, UK, France and Germany. 

One key finding of the survey indicates that an overwhelming 77 percent of CIOs in Australia surveyed worry that further consumerisation of IT will lead to greatly increased business risks.

And, according to Rafi Katanasho, Application Performance Management Director for Compuware Australia and New Zealand, the research shows that the 'age-old disconnect between business and IT is at risk of widening.'

'Employees are clearly hungry to use the same technologies in their business environments that they are already using in their personal lives. This is creating more challenges for those responsible to keep these technologies up and running,' Katanasho says.

Katanasho says that to adapt to this changing dynamic, it's critical for organisations to 'extend best practice management beyond the firewall by first understanding the end user experience of new technologies and services,' and he suggests this is the only way to support end users as they look to take advantage of trends such as cloud and mobility, which can be 'tremendously beneficial to the business if managed well.'

Other key findings of the survey include:

'¢    87 percent of CIOs say deeper insight into the end users' experience of applications helps improve IT maturity.

'¢    A lack of transparency into the performance of cloud and SaaS providers is currently reversing IT maturity across 67 percent of enterprises.

'¢    83 percent of CIOs indicate that the consumerisation of IT will be restricted by the maturity of their application performance management capabilities

'¢    67 percent of CIOs say support for employee mobility is almost impossible due to reliance on external networks, making it much harder to control performance and the end-user experience.

'¢    The consumerisation of IT trend is already driving unrealistic expectations around role of IT in 77 percent of enterprises.

'¢    60 percent of CIOs say that enterprise mobility projects forging ahead without the full involvement of IT.

'¢    77 percent of IT departments are currently prevented from supporting SaaS and Social Media applications because they cannot provide associated SLAs to the business.

The Compuware CIOs survey whitepaper can be downloaded at www.compuware.com/ciosurvey.