Member Article

Seven-in-10 business leaders concerned about their firm's ability to adopt new technology, as over half don't increase their IT budget

With IT increasingly underpinning operations, business models, customer interactions and more, IT’s role in organisations has transformed. The 2018 Insight Intelligent Technology™ Index revealed that despite this, 70 percent of UK business leaders admit to being concerned about their organisation’s ability to adopt new technology. Of those surveyed almost half (48 percent) had not increased their IT budget since 2017, with the figure going up to a staggering 68 percent for small and medium businesses.

With 56 percent of IT decision makers admitting that their department struggles to adapt to IT’s ever-expanding role and only 41 percent of IT organisations receiving a budget increase in 2018; this poses the questions: do business leaders consider IT investment a business priority or a hindrance?

“Business leaders must recognise that investing in technology to improve internal operations and processes is as critical as the investments they are making in enhancing the customer experience. Without adequate resources to support IT’s many and expanding responsibilities, the function becomes a burden on the company rather than a differentiator for competitive advantage.

“When a smooth client experience at the front end is linked to an inefficient back-end, organisations risk delivering, at best, an average overall result. This means that even industries and organisations that are traditionally reluctant to ride the wave of digitisation need to rethink their approach or else risk missing future growth opportunities,” said Lal Hussain, Director of IT Applications, Insight.

Cloud seen as critical to business transformation

For organisations to transform, they need to adopt powerful new technologies which enable more flexible workforces and unlock the value from innovations in areas such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. With almost all (99 percent) of organisations acknowledging that cloud solutions enable them to do this quickly, and at a lower cost than setting up in-house, cloud is seen as increasingly critical to doing business.

So far in 2018, Software as a Service is the most utilised cloud service for 65 percent of respondents, followed by Infrastructure as a Service (58 percent) and Security as a Service (49 percent).

When it came to reaping the benefits of cloud, over half (67 percent) highlighted a more flexible and collaborative IT environment as the main benefit, followed by a safer data environment (52 percent) and better remote access (48 percent).

Budgets must grow to reflect IT’s critical role

While the benefits of increased IT spend and particularly investments in cloud services are evident, more can be achieved when it comes to the role of the IT department within an organisation.

The top areas business leaders believe their technology spend budget needs to grow include security (51 percent), cloud (45 percent), customer relationship management (34 percent) and mobile (31 percent).

Hussain added: “For an organisation to fully reap the benefits of modern IT services, business leaders must come to the realisation that IT is not a cost centre, it’s an innovation centre. IT budgets should not be viewed as a burden, but as the opportunity to enter and succeed in the digital age.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lal Hussain .