In his report published today, Ovum's Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director for Asia-Pacific IT research, says the survey of 63 CIOs completed before the third SE-Corp CIO Strategy Summit in Melbourne in February, reveals that “despite media hype to the contrary, ICT remains predominantly an in-house affair for Australian CIOs.”
“We asked CIOs about how they sourced a range of ICT activities and were surprised to find that three-quarters of the activities were currently provided by an in-house ICT department.”
According to Hodgkinson, it is always difficult to assess the true rate of cloud services adoption, “and to sift fact from fantasy.”
“This survey was conducted as pre-event research for CIOs attending the summit, so it provides a good qualitative assessment of their views on current and target sourcing approaches across a spectrum of 50 ICT activities. These spanned the categories of data centre, network, application development, information management, applications and end-user services.
“The results reveal a rather prosaic focus on traditional in-house IT operations,” Hodgkinson says.
The Ovum report reveals that 74 percent of ICT activities in Australian organisations are currently provided primarily by an in-house ICT department, although Hodgkinson says this figure is projected to decline to 61 percent during the next one to two years.
According to Ovum, shared services arrangements account for around nine percent (9%) of ICT activities, and this is not projected to change much during the next few years. Outsourced arrangements currently account for 13 percent of ICT activities, and Ovum forecasts a rise to 20%during the next one to two years across a range of services, primarily focused on data centre, network, and application development services.
The report reveals that around four percent (4%) of ICT activities are currently sourced as cloud services – primarily software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications – but overall this proportion is projected to rise significantly during the next few years. Cloud sourcing of data centre and application services, in particular, is expected to comprise more than 15% of the ICT mix.
“The reality for this group of CIOs is that ICT management is still about managing the people, processes, and technologies of the in-house ICT department. It is therefore not surprising that a shortage of people and skills was regarded by CIOs as one of their major challenges,” Hodgkinson says.
“However, outsourcing and cloud services are projected to account for one-third of ICT activities overall in the next 1–2 years. Change is definitely coming, while perhaps more slowly than expected, and momentum for cloud services in particular is expected to build during the next few years.”
And, as Hodgkinson recommends: “CIOs with ICT sourced substantially in-house are advised to start gaining skills in the procurement and management of cloud-sourced services sooner rather than later. New mindsets and skills are required, particularly for counterparty risk management and systems integration, and these skills can only be learned with hands-on experience.
“It’s really all about organisational learning and more agile thinking. Also, the experiences of early adopters are that cloud services can be better, faster, less expensive and, overall, less risky. Given this, there are productivity and innovation opportunity costs associated with delaying cloud services adoption,” Hodgkinson concludes.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Peter Dinham
Quelle/Source: iTWire, 16.04.2013
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