Today, EMC releases the State of IT Transformation – the results of an analysis of more than 660 Transformation Workshops we’ve conducted with CIOs and their direct reports. These global organizations are evaluating their current state, assessing gaps, and prioritizing actions they can take to create a digital-ready IT organization that the business needs.
Here are the major gaps they want to close in the 2016-2017 timeframe. How does your organization compare?
Cloud Infrastructure
IT organizations want to be cost-competitive with external service providers and are looking for cost efficiencies by virtualizing, standardizing, and developing hybrid cloud architectures. The good news: over 90% of the participants are in the evaluation or proof of concept stage in having a hybrid cloud architecture, and 70% have targeted 2016-2017 to have hybrid cloud ready for production-level apps. On the other hand, 91% currently have no organized, consistent means of evaluating workloads for hybrid cloud – but 70% expect to close that gap within the next 18 to 24 months.
Operating Model and Service Strategy
Service Catalog and Portal
The first step in becoming a business-focused IT organization is determining what the business wants. The top gap identified by all companies, regardless of geography or industry, is their ability to provide and manage user requests through a service catalog and self-service portal. While the majority has no self-service portal and/or an underdeveloped service catalog, 80% plan to close that gap in the short term.
Resource Provisioning
When it comes to automation, infrastructure provisioning is the most basic service, and the foundation for many other more complex or business-focused services. In an ideal environment, the infrastructure layer would be completely elastic and be able to grow and shrink on demand in order to meet the needs of the organization. Not surprisingly, the goal of 77% of participants is to be able to provision infrastructure resources in less than a day, or dynamically when needed. More surprising: over half of the participants reported that they are currently taking between a week and a month to do so.
Financial Management
For the business to evaluate and compare internal vs. external IT services, transparency of costs is a must have. When it comes to recovering IT costs, 87% of participants still rely on a yearly allocation-based recovery, or a project-by-project recovery. Most want to be able to charge the business back for services actually consumed, but only 5% are able to do this today.
Applications
A critical part of digital transformation is empowering and accelerating application development. The top gaps identified here are in software development times and platforms. 82% of organizations do not have a modern, scalable, infrastructure-independent application framework on which to rapidly and consistently build mobile-friendly, cloud-native apps. Perhaps due to the lack of a modern development framework, 68% of participants take 6 – 12+ months to complete a new software development lifecycle. To net it out: almost all have a target to reduce software release times by 75-90% in the 2016-2017 timeframe.
Industry Highlights
Firms in the healthcare industry identified the most opportunities for improvements in their IT transformation, but they are also the most interested in improving. While they scored themselves the lowest in more areas of transformation (64%) and identified the most areas as having gaps that they needed to close (58%), they also aspire to becoming a “demand-focused” IT organization in more areas (71%) than any other industry.
The financial services industry scored above average in most areas of their transformation. Nearly 40% have a fully supported, documented IT transformation strategy and roadmap.
Retail is the top performer in desktop virtualization with the top 20th percentile having well above 60% of desktops virtualized. They also have a majority of their applications built on a scalable, infrastructure-independent application framework.
Telecommunications is a leader in network virtualization with the average organization more than 40% virtualized and the top 20th percentile nearly 80% virtualized.
Top performers in government had more than 20% of their production apps in a hybrid cloud and had reached nearly 100% in compute and application virtualization.
View the full State of IT Transformation report and see how your organization compares.
