OREANDA-NEWS. November 01, 2012. With an IT landscape that is increasingly driven by user-demand, a study has today revealed that two thirds of IT departments in the UK are under growing pressure to allow users to download applications that do not fit into their traditional corporate applications profile. Despite this pressure only a third of IT departments currently have a ‘bring your own application’ (BYOA) policy in place – highlighting an urgent need for organisations to adopt a more strategic and proactive approach to applications management.

The research, carried out by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Fujitsu UK & Ireland, went on to reveal that over two thirds of IT decision makers do not have a complete view of what exists in their applications portfolio currently. Similarly two thirds would not be able to provide a complete overview of which applications are most valuable to end-users, demonstrating a worrying lack of knowledge around which applications are necessary to the business and which are ultimately costing the business.

“Since the introduction of the PC in the early 1980’s, there has been a level of self-procurement of applications and hardware so, to that extent, the Bring Your Own Application and Bring Your Own Device trends are not unfamiliar to most IT organisations” observed Andrew Crocker, CIO of global mining company AngloGold Ashanti. “However, the growing number of organisations and users pursuing these IT provisioning approaches, and their increasing legitimacy as alternate, if not primary, procurement models, has meant that IT is no longer able to characterise BYOA as unofficial and, therefore, outside of the mainstream support model. The tensions that are arising from this shift in thinking are very much highlighted in the survey results and clearly there is going to have to be a move to more radical service provision and support models for most IT organisations if costs are to be contained. This is something that we are beginning to examine closely.”

Just 27% of IT decision makers feel that their applications portfolio is fully aligned to business strategy and 40% admit to not knowing the real cost of running the applications portfolio for the business. With clear evidence in the study that more users intend to download their own applications, complexity is likely to further increase and the applications blind spot will continue to threaten overall business productivity and efficiency.

“While businesses need agility and efficiency from technology, they also need to keep costs at a minimum. The levels of confusion around the applications portfolio revealed in this survey however highlight a fundamental barrier to achieving these goals,” explained Helen Lamb, director Business & Applications Service Group, Fujitsu UK & Ireland. “If an organisation does not have a clear view of the cost of their applications portfolio, they therefore don’t know how much money and time is being wasted managing it - a problem exacerbated by the fact that the majority of respondents also do not know with certainty which applications are most valuable to end users. Fujitsu carried out a similar study in 2011 which revealed that just over half of CIOs did not have clear visibility of their applications portfolio, compared to two thirds feeling that way now – a clear indication that this is a growing problem that needs addressing with urgency.”