83% of IT and business leaders say adapting to change requires better apps and infrastructure

Appian has announced the availability of “IT’s changing mandate in an age of disruption,” a new report from The Economist Intelligence Unit (The EIU), supported by Appian. The report’s findings are rooted in a twin survey, conducted by The EIU, of more than 1,000 IT decision-makers and senior business executives at major corporations around the globe.

The survey results highlight the shortcomings of existing IT systems. IT backlogs are significant and IT’s control over the digital infrastructure is slipping. As business demand for new software applications grows, more work is spilling into non-IT development, and most business leaders expect that trend to increase.

In parallel, there is overwhelming agreement that applications need to improve to make organisations more responsive to changing business conditions. 83% of respondents say adapting better to external change requires moderate-to-considerable IT infrastructure and apps improvement.

“The report shows organisations are expecting more from IT at a time when employees and enterprise data are more dispersed than ever. With Low-code, IT can gain agility and deliver the complex applications that businesses need,” said Matt Calkins, CEO of Appian.

The survey data also highlights a path forward. The need for business agility, spurred by the COVID pandemic, is causing IT to forge a new role based on delivering organisational resilience. When asked for the most impactful areas to improve, the top three responses were supporting remote workers (72%), Integrating information and workflows across the organisation (69%) and changing systems and processes quickly (69%).

Additional report highlights include:

●    3-12 months is the average backlog for planned IT projects, and the situation is worsening as business project demand outstrips IT budget growth.

●    55% of respondents say business units already do more than IT to procure or develop new applications.

●    53% of business decision-makers believe the volume of applications built or sourced by non-IT business units will increase over the next 12 months.

●    75% of business decision-makers state that when procuring or creating new applications, they prefer to keep their data where it is rather than move it to new repositories.

●    61% of business decision-makers report that they’ve had to cancel a digital project because the proposed app or solution could not access the right data.

●    Despite the importance of advanced automation technologies, 71% of respondents report that relatively few of their applications have AI and/or machine learning capabilities, and 57% report that RPA projects often fail.