Consumer tech in the enterprise threatens IT maturity: report
IT departments are struggling under unrealistic expectations and lack key tools
By Sophie Curtis | Techworld | Published: 13:10, 12 December 2011
Adoption of cloud-based applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the enterprise could undermine efforts over recent years to boost security, compliance and basic infrastructure and application management - IT maturity - according to new research.
In a survey of 520 CIOs, carried out by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Compuware, 73 percent said that their adoption of consumer technology in the enterprise will be restricted by the immaturity of their application performance management capabilities.
Meanwhile, 64 percent said that a lack of transparency into the performance of cloud and SaaS providers is worrying and could be rolling back hard won maturity and best practices implemented by the IT department.
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Overall, 86 percent of respondents said that deeper insight into the end users’ experience of applications helps improve IT maturity.
“You now have hundreds or thousands of employees or customers interacting with your applications; but if those applications were previously delivered out of your data centre, you would be able to monitor them,” said Steve Tack, CTO of Compuware’s APM Business Unit at Compuware, speaking to Techworld. “Now that they're delivered, perhaps over a mobile network sitting in a third party data centre, there is no longer that level of visibility.”
Tack said that application performance management (APM) allows enterprises to measure applications from the point of consumption, enabling to hold cloud service providers to account if their service provision is not up to scratch.
“If you've got an organisation that has put a lot of energy and effort into raising the maturity of their in-house developed applications, if they haven't got an APM strategy that allows them to deliver with that same level of maturity for cloud-based delivered apps and SaaS applications, maybe that's going to restrict their ability to leverage this consumerisation trend,” said Tack.
The report also highlighted that the consumerisation of IT trend is driving unrealistic expectations around role of IT. Of those CIOs surveyed, 64 percent said that enterprise mobility projects are forging ahead without the full involvement of IT, even though support for employee mobility is often impossible due to reliance on external networks.
Meanwhile, 73 percent of IT departments are currently prevented from supporting SaaS and Social Media applications because they cannot provide associated service level agreements (SLAs) to the business.
“This research shows that the age-old disconnect between business and IT is at risk of widening,” said Tack. “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. 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.”
Earlier this year, Compuware added mobile user monitoring to the latest release of its Gomez application management software. The company said the addition was important because businesses increasingly depend on revenue-generating and customer-facing applications that use mobile devices.
