It’s gone on too long. Beleaguered IT departments just keep on being asked to do more with less. It happens with staff – someone leaves and isn’t replaced, or worse, layoffs occur. Then at the end of the year, with a few less bodies around, the new budget proclaims that IT will just have to make do with 20% less funding.
Obviously, management would lower its expectations accordingly in terms of project load, right? Dream on. More often than not, radical budget cuts accompany strategic plans that call for IT to launch several new software development initiatives.
This has certainly been the trend for years, even decades. But is it really still the case in today’s more enlightened world? A study by the Uptime Institute took a detailed look at this area. It found that enterprise IT departments are shrinking due to budget pressures, IT hardware advances and the outsourcing of workloads to cloud providers. For the last five years, said the institute, approximately 50% of enterprise IT departments have reported flat or shrinking of overall budgets. This encompasses combined spend for on-premises technology infrastructure of IT and data centre facilities.
This isn’t a one year anomaly either. Uptime Institute said this figure has remained steady in each recent survey it has conducted, so there has been no real change in the ongoing trend of demanding IT do more with less. While a few enterprise IT organisations are receiving modest budget increases, fewer than 10% are realizing significant growth. So in the face of soaring demands to develop mobile-enabled technology for users, analytics apps for various lines of business, and more tools for vital sectors such as sales enablement, IT departments have their backs to the wall. Not only are they having to do so much more with so few, they are struggling to keep up with constantly evolving technology skillsets in areas such as agile development, new programming languages, and the latest cloud architectures.
So what’s the answer? Put simply, IT needs more help. To keep pace with the breakneck speed of modern application development, IT departments need the assistance of seasoned custom software developers who can hit the ground running and get a project done fast. This enables IT to focus on its own areas of competence, as well as maintaining internal IT assets and managing cloud relationships.
This is also a smart way to go according to the very same Uptime Institute survey. Its research revealed that only 7% of enterprises were dissatisfied with their outsourcing contracts. That’s why the institute noted that outsourcing has experienced tremendous growth in the last 5 years.
From application modernisation to cloud migration, Ballard Chalmers has the expertise and experience to support your custom development requirements. For more information contact us.
By Drew Robb, Contributor
Drew Robb is a freelance editor and writer, specialising in the Information Technology sector.
