The BMC study of over 650 IT decision makers across 12 countries found that by 2020, 94 percent of IT decision makers expect automation to spread from IT departments into all areas of business in order to keep pace with the accelerated digital business innovation race sweeping every industry and region worldwide. The Top 3 areas of investment priority in the next 24 months are containerisation, workload automation/scheduling and DevOps.
“As companies continue to incorporate hybrid cloud capabilities across the digital enterprise, they are challenged by the complexity of managing workloads across on premises, public and private clouds,” said Gur Steif, president, digital business automation at BMC. “IT teams must be able to manage the customer value chain in spite of decentralised usage of cloud services. This is requiring a new level of IT automation to adapt to the challenges posed by increasingly diverse infrastructure, disparate data, and accelerated applications – the critical components of digital business.”
Almost 9 in 10 (89% of) global IT decision makers agree that IT automation must be used in new ways to achieve their desired digital business objectives. Enterprise architects, in particular, cite various obstacles preventing them from achieving their digital business objectives, including a lack of the necessary budget (67 percent), skills (44 percent) and time (51 percent.)
Gur Steif added, “BMC believes that without taking a new approach to IT automation, companies will not be able to overcome the budget, skills, and time constraint challenges identified by the survey respondents. Only through new digital-first technologies with automation solutions that support hybrid multi-clouds, will CIOs enable their companies to innovate, transform, and accelerate growth by aggressively pursuing a digital agenda that differentiates them from their competitors.”
The research also suggests that businesses face other digital transformation challenges in ensuring objectives are aligned. Of CIOs surveyed, 42 percent believed that conflicting objectives remain between business units, with 32 percent of CIOs expressing the need for tighter internal organisational alignment.
Despite the new challenges and opportunities associated with digital business automation, the BMC study found that 88 percent of IT decision makers believe they are empowered to deliver the required IT innovation to drive digital business transformation and bridge this gap, and 77 percent of respondents believe that businesses are doing enough to prepare and train the workforce with greater automation skills. Respondents in the USA (97 percent), Mexico (98 percent), and Spain (94 percent) feel the most empowered to deliver IT innovation.
Seventy-six percent of global respondents consider themselves excellent or very good at using data to deliver tangible business outcomes for a competitive advantage (88 percent in North America, 80 percent in South America, 75 percent in Europe, and 64 percent in APAC.)
