IT teams losing control of digital infrastructure

Australian IT departments are struggling to deliver on an unsustainable backlog of digital transformation projects, according to new research commissioned by Appian.

The research, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, found that 85% of Australian tech leaders report that growth in business project requests dwarfs growth in the IT budgets needed to deliver these projects.

Australian technology projects are facing a backlog of three months to a year, the research shows. The discrepancy between business project and IT budget growth is significantly more pronounced in Australia compared to the global average of 64%.

But the research also found indications that IT departments are losing control over the use of IT within their organisation. Some 63% of Australian executives and 76% of IT decision-makers agree that non-IT business units take the lead in procuring or developing most of the applications that they use.

Meanwhile, four in five business leaders believe that their organisation needs to improve its IT infrastructure and applications in order to better adapt to external change.

The report cites a response from BUPA ANZ CIO Sami Yalavac that explains the dilemma for IT departments.

“You simply can’t be agile if you have this traditional model of people in the business setting requirements and people in IT trying to fulfil those requirements without really understanding the reason for them or what the end goal is,” he said.

“What you get then is IT working hard, only for people in the business to turn around and say, ‘That’s not what we meant’, or ‘It doesn’t work the way we thought it would’. These conversations can go backwards and forwards for months, and all the time, customers are still waiting and employees can’t get work done effectively.”

On the flip side, 77% of Australian business leaders report that their IT colleagues are highly effective in collaborating on new product development.

But Australian business leaders are facing challenges involving data accessibility, with 61% of Australian business leaders reporting that they have had to cancel a digital business project due to lacking the needed data.

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