How Empowering Business Users Helps IT

How Empowering Business Users Helps IT

By Karen A. Frenkel

52% of IT professionals are confident the user experience for most business applications is favorable. To evaluate that, 54% of respondents conduct user surveys, and 49% observe users working.

Asked how well IT lines up with the organization’s business goals, 18% said “very well” in 2014, whereas 22% say so this year. Last year, 34% responded “well,” whereas this year 39% did so.

Only 8% of respondents think business leaders understand IT’s goals “very well,” in contrast to 13% this year. For 2014, 32% said business leaders understood their goals “well,” compared to 37% this year.

IT continues to feel that business users do not view IT as a strategic part of the organization. 41% of respondents said they help primarily as a service provider. 33% said business regards them as a trusted ally, but only part strategist and part executor.

55% of IT executives said business users do not often leverage technology that their department did not implement or manage.

According to IT leaders, business users perceive process automation as a must-have (45%), or nice to have but hard to implement (48%), and only 7% as not necessary.

IT collaborates with operations, finance, product research and development, the C-suite, sales and marketing, human resources, and legal. In operations, for example, 56% say they almost always collaborate, 37% of IT leaders say they frequently worked together, and only 6% say they occasionally collaborate.

30% of respondents are not sure their budget supports consumerization of IT. 34% indicated that they do not know what percent of this year’s budget they will allocate to support that goal.

Asked what trends they think will have the longest lasting, positive impact on business users, respondents answered as follows: Smart machines: 18%, IoT: 33%, Web-scale IT: 31%, Bring Your Own Application: 18%