Reality of ‘more with less’ is hurting digitisation efforts, says research

The reality for customers of having to do “more with less” is starting to generate challenges and threatens to cause a fall back in digitisation efforts.

According to research of CIOs shared by SoftwareOne, the vast majority of IT leaders (83%) are under pressure to make budgets stretch further than they have done in the past.

The focus is on improving cloud cost management and driving down increasing technical debt, but already 72% of CIOs quizzed felt that they were falling behind in digital transformation efforts.

A lot of the issues with cloud costs stem from some of the rushed decisions made during the pandemic, with a number of users admitting they did not have the time to optimise workloads before migration, with many miscalculating the budget needed and dealing with an overspend since.

As well as cutting cloud costs and trying to keep a lid on rising technical debt, the other main concern was the ongoing reliance that many CIOs had on legacy on-premise systems.

“Businesses are dealing with an uncertain economic environment, which makes planning big IT transformations a challenge. Yet organisations need to move to the cloud and modernise legacy applications to remain competitive,” said Craig Thomson, senior vice-president of cloud and application services at SoftwareOne.

“We’re seeing a real need for a combination of innovation with optimisation. Our clients are looking for pragmatic step-by-step transformation initiatives, rather than wholesale megalithic projects that can be hard to get approved when budgets are under pressure,” he added.

One sweet spot the channel could help to deliver are tools and services that help with cloud cost transparency. The research also indicated that even with ongoing economic pressures, many users will continue to invest in application modernisation and security over the course of 2023.

There have been some warnings sounded in the channel about the dangers for customers of accruing technical debt through stalling investments.

Barry O’Donnell, chief technology officer at TSG, recently said that the risks involved include reduced performance, productivity loss, rising costs of IT support and reducing security.

“Technical debt should be viewed in the same way any monetary debt would be. It is an issue which is solved in the long term rather than the immediate future,” he said.

He added that taking a strategic view of what areas could be improved and prioritising those with a channel partner was the best place for most customers to start: “This is not a quick fix. Instead, this could take a number of years to rectify, but the time and money investment will be worthwhile to see productivity increase.”