Taking the pulse of IT strategy
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The results of Information Age's annual user survey
Effective IT Survey Results In 2010, most IT organisations stuck to the conservative approach they had adopted during the recession
At the start of 2010, with the credit crunch behind them and IT spending already cut back to the quick, IT executives might have hoped the year ahead would bring fresh opportunities to invest in their departments and in their technology estates. It would have seemed optimistic even then, but nobody knew for sure how fast – indeed, if at all – the economy would recover.
That optimism, this year’s Effective IT Survey found, would have been misplaced. There was only one IT strategy that a greater proportion of respondents adopted for the first time in 2010 than in 2009, and that was reducing staffing costs.
Fresh uptake of new technologies was just as muted as it had been the year before. Two rare technology strategies that did attract new adoption in 2010 were server virtualisation, which 21.9% of respondents had adopted in the past year, and social media (20.5%).
The survey results suggest that many IT leaders had their ambitions for 2010 frustrated by continued budgetary constraint. In last year’s survey, a significant proportion of respondents signalled plans to adopt strategies such as master data management (27.7%), information life-cycle management (22.0%) and corporate-wide business intelligence (21.4%) in what was then the coming year.
As it happened, only a small proportion of this year’s sample did actually adopt those strategies during the year: 7.7% for master data management, 9.7% for information life-cycle management and just 6.1% for corporate-wide
business intelligence.
The sample was not identical in both years, and whether or not the respondents who planned to deploy those strategies in 2010 ever had the required support from the business is not known. Nevertheless, it seems as though the continued reluctance of businesses to invest in IT took some Information Age readers by surprise.
Given the lack of new implementations, it stands to reason that the ranking of the most adopted strategies was largely unchanged from last year. Remote/mobile working was the most commonly adopted strategy for the third year in a row. Server virtualisation rose from fourth place to second, while asset management, videoconferencing and reducing IT staffing costs again made up the remainder of the top five.
At the other end of the adoption scale were desktop Linux, outsourcing the entire IT department and, perhaps surprisingly, utility computing, which in the form of infrastructure-as-a-service offerings such as Amazon Web Services attracted keen attention from the IT industry in 2010. (Whether or not respondents identify AWS and the like as utility-computing offerings is not clear. Here is an example of the terminology changing – in this case to ‘cloud computing’ – while the technology remains roughly the same.)
For the second year in a row, the IT strategy that most respondents said they plan to adopt in the coming year was master data management. Given the aforementioned mismatch between intention and adoption, it will be interesting to see whether these plans prove any more fruitful in 2011.
Another technology that a number of respondents hope to adopt in 2011 is desktop virtualisation (18.5%). This is interesting, because that strategy was rated as either ‘effective’ or ‘very effective’ by only 52.6% of its adopters – only three strategies out of 30 were less likely to be rated effective by respondents that had used them.
This does not necessarily mean that the companies planning to adopt desktop virtualisation in 2011 are walking blindly into ineffective IT projects, however, as the technology has, by some accounts at least, improved in recent years.
When Information Age spoke to South Africa’s Standard Bank about its desktop virtualisation project in March 2010, infrastructure architect Paul Cotgrove explained that a previous, server-based attempt had been “a complete disaster”.
The new project, based instead on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology, had been successful, he said, although some users had resisted it based on the prior experience.
Top Ten Most Adopted IT Strategies
Next: Which IT strategies were the most effective?
