Study reveals companies see IT as a customer-focused business

EMC Corporation has recently held their fourth annual CIO Connect Summit at the Yas Viceroy, Abu Dhabi, on 25th – 26th May.

In addition to interactive presentations and workshops held during the two-day event, EMC also highlighted its State of IT Transformation report, an analysis of more than 660 EMC and VMware customers worldwide and who shared insights on the direction of IT transformation investments in the region.

The State of IT Transformation report is based on a qualified evaluation of companies who attended IT Transformation workshops conducted by EMC and VMware and are in the midst of IT transformation initiatives. EMC and VMware aided the companies to determine the gaps, progress and objectives in their long term and short term IT transformation journeys.

The report indicated that organisations are seeking to be cost-efficient, hence, can save as much as 24 percent in operations by transforming IT. Regardless of industry, most organisations reported wanting to improve their IT service strategy to run IT like a customer-focused business.

While 90 percent of organisations indicated the importance of having a documented IT transformation strategy and roadmap with executive and line of business support, 55 percent admitted to having nothing documented.

80 percent indicated they want to standardise services in a business-focused catalogue with a self-service portal and increase automation to improve IT service delivery including:

• Resource Provisioning – Delivery of continuous service to meet customer demands and prevent financial setbacks depends upon streamlining all business processes by provisioning the infrastructure timely. 77 percent of participants expressed the desire to provision infrastructure resources in less than a day, or dynamically as needed.
• Financial Management – 87 percent said they rely on a yearly allocation-based recovery, or a project-by-project recovery of IT costs.
• Metering – 88 percent of organisations said they want to get to a state where they use automation to track the resources each business unit is consuming.

The study further highlighted that mobile services have revolutionised customer engagement, becoming a medium to broaden the reach of every company. This necessitates the need to provide customers quick access to services through mobile. According to the report, participants said they want to automate the application framework to help their organisations develop software and mobile applications faster. Yet, more than 80 percent of participants reported lacking a scalable, infrastructure-independent application framework and 68 percent said their organisations take six to 12 months or more to complete a new application development lifecycle.

In addition, most organisations indicated they want to have hybrid cloud architecture for their production applications within the next 18-24 months.

Key Highlights by industry

• Healthcare – Firms in the healthcare industry are the least mature in their IT transformation and scored themselves the lowest in more areas while prioritising gaps in more areas than any other industry.

• Retail – They also report having a majority of their applications built on a scalable, infrastructure-independent application framework.

• Telecommunications – participants in this sector lead in network virtualisation with the average firm reporting they’ve achieved 40 percent in network virtualisation; the top 20 percent of companies in this sector have achieved nearly 80 percent network virtualisation.

• Financial Services – participants scored above average in most areas of their IT transformation initiatives with nearly 40 percent having a fully supported, documented IT transformation strategy and roadmap.

• Government – top 20 percent reported having over 20 percent of production apps in a hybrid cloud and nearly 100 percent of compute and applications virtualised.

Habib Mahakian, Vice President, Gulf & Pakistan, EMC, said, “Business needs should adapt to changing consumer demands, which are evolving at a rapid pace. This underlines the need for CIOs to strategically envisage adding more value to consumer engagements and drive competitive differentiation by attaining unprecedented organisational efficiencies. As business needs continue to change and the role of the modern day CIO evolves, it is time to undertake IT transformation in order to enable business scalability. The State of IT Transformation report indicates that organisations across industries can benefit from transforming their IT service strategy by adopting software-defined technologies. We look forward to helping our customers adopt and embrace an IT transformation strategy, thus driving business and extracting a higher enterprise value”.