HANOVER, Md.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–TEKsystems®, a leading provider of IT staffing solutions, human capital management expertise and IT services, today announced findings from its quarterly IT Executive Outlook survey, conducted in partnership with the Inavero Institute.
Benefits and Impact of IT Trends
Major trends like mobility, cloud computing, consumerization of IT and big data are expected to have strong impacts on organizations this year. The top benefits IT leaders anticipate they will experience include increases in employee productivity, improved internal and external customer satisfaction and the ability to make better business decisions. Forty-six percent of IT leaders expect the top benefit of mobile initiatives to be an increase in employee productivity. Further, with the consumerization of IT, 25% of respondents foresee improved internal customer satisfaction as the top benefit.
A large majority, 76%, of IT decision makers indicate mobile trends will have a high to extremely high impact on their organization. Over 50% of IT leaders also expect cloud computing (58%), consumerization of IT (53%) and social media (52%) will have large impacts on organizations this year.
“Considering the expectations IT leaders have about how these trends will affect their organizations, it’s critical they ensure these highly impactful and highly visible projects are executed successfully,” says TEKsystems Director, Rachel Russell. “Most organizations know that strong partnerships between the IT and business functions are critical to success. What many overlook, however, is the importance of building a solid, forward-looking workforce plan to address critical skill gaps and competencies required before, during and after initiatives are implemented.”
Confidence in Organization’s Strategy
Respondents are most confident in their organization’s strategy to implement mobile initiatives (61%), cloud computing (55%) and social media (52%). It is important to note that these confidence levels, while positive, are average. Further, more than half of IT leaders express lower confidence levels in the organization’s strategies on successfully addressing the IT worker shortage (58%), consumerization of IT (54%) and enterprise resource planning projects (53%).
“No matter how much confidence there is in the strategy, the only way to make certain projects successful is to have the right people in place to plan, build and run the program,” states Russell. “So many times we see organizations have to rework key IT projects that are over budget and behind schedule because workforce planning was an afterthought in the process.”
Barriers to Success
The most notable factor IT leaders report that will inhibit them from successfully implementing major IT initiatives is the lack of necessary staff to execute the project, with 56% saying this is the top barrier to success. Other key inhibitors include not allocating the right budget and lacking an enterprise-wide strategy, with 38% and 31% of respondents indicating these barriers respectively.
Commitment to Change or Lack Thereof
Most IT decision makers recognize that in order to take advantage of the business benefits associated with the major IT trends, their organization will need to make significant changes. However, the majority indicate their organizations are uncommitted to making changes in areas critical to successful IT projects. Over 55% of IT leaders indicate their organization is uncommitted to making the necessary changes to workforce planning strategy (64%), IT’s organizational structure (61%) and IT’s workforce strategy (61%).
“People are the single most important factor to ensuring IT initiatives have a high rate of success. It’s concerning to see a gap between organizations recognizing what needs to be changed and actually taking action to make the changes necessary for success. Organizations have to dedicate themselves 100% to finding the right people and building the right competencies over time,” states Russell. “Most of the time organizations put a great deal of emphasis on selecting the right technologies and partners and not enough on creating a strategy to address their workforce needs. The bottom line is that people make projects successful. Failing to devote the proper amount of attention to them can severely impact the business outcomes of an IT project.”
About the IT Executive Outlook Survey:
TEKsystems partners with the Inavero Institute to conduct a quarterly survey of more than 1,500 IT leaders. The first quarter 2012 online survey was completed by IT decision makers during December 2011. IT managers and directors represented the majority of survey respondents at 85%, and IT executives made up the remaining 15% of responses. IT leaders represented all industries, regions and company sizes.
