IT Challenges Impact Business Initiatives: Cisco

IT organizations are facing big challenges these days as businesses increase the number of new application rollouts and create new connected user experiences to better serve their customers. While the majority of IT leaders feel they are closely aligned with business practices, business applications are still being deployed without their knowledge, according to the findings of a new study from Cisco (News - Alert).

While a majority (63 percent) of IT professionals are confident in their ability to respond to the needs of the business, the study revealed that almost one-third (27 percent) compared their company’s business initiatives to a foggy day in London.

The 2013 Cisco Global IT Impact Survey also revealed the extent to which network investments are keeping pace with the demands of the business and the likelihood to adopt new technologies that can improve IT business impact. According to the study, applications and user expectations are becoming more complex with almost three-quarters (71 percent) reporting that IT is deploying more applications today than they were one year ago.

With IT and the network increasingly enabling businesses, there is greater potential for IT to make an impact, according to Rob Soderbery, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Enterprise Networking Group.

“More than ever, IT has the potential to make a profound impact on the business – and opportunity to act as a strategic partner – by building a network architecture that can leverage multiple technology transitions,” Soderbery said in a statement. “The most successful IT professionals are those who acknowledge that fast decision-making within the enterprise is directly tied to the readiness of the network.”

The study also found that IT/business alignment is improving, but IT is not always involved when it comes to decision making. In fact, nine out of 10 (89 percent) IT leaders collaborate with business leaders at least on a monthly basis, which points to a “mutual business understanding of the critical and growing role of the network for application delivery,” Cisco officials said.

However, more than one-third (38 percent) of IT professionals said they are brought into the planning and deployment process late.

In addition, when asked to compare the visibility of IT within their organizations, 36 percent said “innovator” was the best description of how business leaders viewed their role, while 34 percent said “orchestrator” was the best fit.

In ranking the most difficult IT initiative over the past year, moving applications to the cloud (40 percent) ranked first, with data center virtualization ranking second (38 percent), which is consistent with the 2012 Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey.