With big tech investments come big expectations. So says a survey of 313 IT and business professionals released by Computerworld's research group.
Compared to a similar survey done in 2012, a higher percentage of respondents reported this year that they are adopting, have already deployed or have optimized their ROI from mobile (74%), cloud (58%) and consumer IT (45%) projects. Collaboration tools' implementation and ROI remained stable, with 73% of respondents saying their companies have deployed them or are doing so.
Overall, a slightly smaller percentage of companies are adopting big data initiatives, and those seem to be concentrated in organizations of 1,000 or more employees.
Expectations for these technology investments include productivity (cited most often about mobility and collaboration tools). Reducing operating costs is the primary goal with cloud. Consumerization of IT is expected to improve customer service and reduce operating costs.
Other results include:
- An increasing focus away from core infrastructure investments -- including storage and legacy software -- toward "edge" technologies that are customer-facing. This split will grow from the current 72% core/28% edge to a 64/36 split.
- Financial and productivity benefits are the most compelling reasons respondents said they switch vendors.
- When evaluating new technologies for use in their companies, 80% said integration with existing systems was the most important factor, followed by cost containment and improved business processes and collaboration.
Respondents cited communication challenges, as well as business leaders viewing IT as a cost center, as problematic. There is also a disconnect about the issue of shadow IT: 59% of IT leaders said business units are not outsourcing technology directly, compared to 48% of respondents as a whole.
Download the executive summary (PDF).