Top 10 ways to spot an impending business IT Bottleneck

Scott Nelson, managing vice-president at Gartner, believes we are about to witness a worrying confluence of trends that, if ignored, will leave many organisations unable to respond effectively to new business demands. “We are seeing the IT conversation dominated by what projects to do next, status of existing projects and talk of maintenance efforts,” he says. “The danger is that many organisations are doing the equivalent of looking down at each step they take, rather than picking their heads up and seeing where the steps are leading. For many companies, the potential for an IT train wreck is significant if the warning signs are not heeded.” Val Sribar, group vice president at Gartner, adds that it’s too easy for companies to turn a blind eye to changes in the IT application landscape, but that these systemic changes are unavoidable – and companies that ignore the signs will have problems with their application strategies. “Understanding the key signs of change in applications will help companies to develop effective plans to modernise their application environments,” he adds. To help with exactly that, Gartner has released its top ten indicators that should set alarm bells ringing. Number one is skills shortages: many companies are investing huge sums, it says, in hiring programmers to keep an old system running. Instead, they need a strategy for supporting the business that fully exploits, for as long as possible, the investment in the old system, but which, most importantly, also recognises that a replacement system strategy is also needed. Gartner’s number two is about vendor/product consolidation/support: as the number of vendors shrinks and products age, those products are retired by the acquiring company and taken off support status – resulting in increasing maintenance charges and little in the way of incremental functionality. However, companies often depend on these systems, and switching to a new application is both inconvenient and resource-intensive. Gartner believes that, in some cases it, requires resources that the IT group does not have and as a result, companies work harder to maintain more outdated but mission-critical applications. At number three is what the analyst calls ‘agility metrics decay’, meaning that the KPIs for making business changes decay as systems become more ‘brittle’ and the ‘piling on effect’ worsens. The point: businesses often cannot afford to change because the IT organisation can’t support the changes. The result is a loss of business agility in an increasingly agile world. Warning sign number four is about escalating operational expenses, and these becoming a larger portion of the IT budget. Gartner’s observation is that, when this happens, there are fewer resources to work on anything new. Number five concerns the classic ageing technology portfolio, which, as it drifts further away from desired ‘future state’ architecture standards, means that any IT vision becomes increasingly impossible to achieve. The result is an increasingly outdated set of systems and infrastructure that becomes the source of more problems, says Gartner. Difficult to access information is the next worrying sign, driven by ageing data structures. Gartner makes the very valid point that modern business users are highly information-dependent, so as the data becomes more out of date, less accurate and more difficult to access, the business is increasingly forced to work without the information needed to make decisions. Sign number seven concerns what Gartner terms legacy capacity risk – essentially meaning that old stuff takes more IT resources as the business attempts to interface it to the changing real world. Web connections, for example, drive up transaction volumes, resulting in greater spending on processing and storage. Also, this legacy capacity is usually priced at a premium compared with newer technologies riding the consumer curve Number eight is a problem to do with regulatory compliance, which can impact even lightly regulated industries. Gartner suggests that any company may be at the mercy of outdated systems to the extent that it finds itself simply unable to meet the needs of increased regulation. Increasing IT costs alongside decreasing business agility is the ninth sign, with Gartner making the point that direct business purchasing of IT-related services drives up central IT costs while agility is actually reduced. Finally, at number 10 is green IT. Today’s CIOs, says Gartner, are likely to have targets that will involve substantial infrastructure changes to achieve environmental objectives – and those will almost inevitably carry unpalatable implications for the application portfolio. “By developing an application strategy and focusing on retiring older systems, CIOs will be best placed to fund an IT modernisation programme that works to drive the IT organisation to achieve a desired state,” concludes Andy Kyte, vice president and Gartner fellow.