UK companies' investments in technology in the past year
were driven by concerns oversoftware licensing, data management
and the need to raise productivity, research by Computer Weekly has
revealed.
The latest CIO index survey of 145 UK IT directors found that
automated software
asset tracking topped the list of UK businesses' technology
investments, with 34% of respondents reporting full deployment in
2007.
According to the research, software asset tracking was
implemented by 21% of respondents in part of their organisation,
and 19% were conducting pilot studies and 14% were reviewing the
potential benefit of doing so. Only 12% had not looked at automated
software asset tracking, but Wesche said there would always be
laggards in any technology adoption.
"The complexity of licensing agreements from many software
suppliers led to a demand by IT directors for tools to enable them
to know software licensing was up to date in their organisations,"
said Peter Wesche, research director of IT asset management and
procurement at Gartner Research.
Stephen Way, division IT director at manufacturer Johnson
Matthey, said most of the big software suppliers were becoming very
strict on licensing and were policing the matter
"aggressively".
"Software asset tracking is important to ensure organisations
stay on the right side of the law, but also provides visibility and
assurance that everyone is using the correct version of software,"
he said.
The research also revealed an increase in the number of
companies implementing companywide mobile strategies. The
proportion of companies deploying mobile technologies across their
organisations to boost productivity and efficiency leaped up to 29%
from 10% in 2006, when 52% said they were using mobile technology
only in some departments.
Richard King, IT director at
Procter & Gamble, said enterprise-wide deployment did not
always make economic sense. "We have deployed mobile technologies
on a needs basis only where there is real business benefit. Carte
blanche deployment can be very expensive and not necessarily the
best use of funds," he said.
As the cost of running mobile technologies continues to fall,
King said there has been a gradual increase in the number of good
business cases for deployment.
The third largest technology priority for business in the past
year was consolidation of servers. The CIO Index showed 28% of CIOs
had consolidated servers across their organisation in 2007, 40% had
done so at a departmental level, 14% were conducting pilots, and
15% were conducting reviews. Only 3% said they were not considering
server consolidation at all.
This trend looks set to continue in 2008 as many companies seek
to reclaim server room space, reduce expenditure on hardware, and
cut power costs for
running and cooling large datacentres.
These strategies are being used by most organisations as they
struggle to find ways of dealing with the explosion in the amount
of data being generated and stored by the business, Way said, which
is also reflected by the fact that 18% of CIOs in the survey have
consolidated servers across their organisations.
The findings are supported by Gartner, which identified service
and storage technologies as the third most important technology
issue for companies in 2008, up from ninth position in 2006.
"Organisations need to fight what Gartner calls the information
glut created by the data being generated by various systems such as
those for business intelligence, customer relationship management,
data mining, and security threat tracking," Wesche said.