Wikibon, in collaboration with SiliconAngle’s ServicesAngle, conducted it’s very first IT Transformation Survey in May and June of this year.  The research and analytics firm organized the information into seven different Action Items, taking a look at various segments of the field under the heading of “IT Transformation Initiatives.”  The survey looked at the biggest IT challenges of 2012 with “data growth,” and “budget constraints” being the top two responses with “getting our arms around the cloud,” and “security issues” closely behind.

By taking a macro approach to the challenges of IT Transformation Initiatives, the Wikibon survey is better able to gleam the larger picture of where organizations are in terms of the challenges they feel they are encountering and are most pressing.

The respondents were broken down into one of five organizations: Enterprise IT organization (IT buyer); Vendor of technology; IT service provider; Reseller/integrator of information technologies; and Other.  Seventy-five percent of those who responded were from the US, with 17 percent from Europe and 7 percent from the Asia Pacific region.  The size of the organization’s 2012 IT budget was also organized, with eight breakdowns ranging from under $100,000 to over $100 million.  When asked which role describes their position as their organization, a majority (24 percent) said “technical consultant,” followed by (20 percent) “IT executive management,” and (15 percent) “business line management.”

Data and budget problems go hand-in-hand

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Data growth, budget constraints, and data problems all are issues that go hand in hand, due to the explosive growth of the technology keeping up with the increase in data growth is a constant struggle for budgets and organizations trying in these difficult economic times to stay within their budget.  The survey points out that, “Technologies such as data deduplication, have possibly allowed customers to keep pace but have clearly not solved the data growth problem.  The one consultation users have is that without these technologies life could be even more challenging.” Yet, the authors of the survey point out, the adoption of storage optimization technology could help to alleviate the pressure.

Action Item: IT organizations must increasingly find ways to extract value from data.  By demonstrating that data has monetary value, ITOs will increasingly get required budget to both manage data, but more importantly, monetize data for organizational benefit.

The transformation from the IT department being merely a cost center to being a service provider is an expensive one, and with 2012 being the year of the cloud, the costs are quite high.  Respondent answers confirmed that most companies are not in a position to be able to focus on anything other than infrastructure, with 30 percent believing their transformation is focused mainly on this area.  Unfortunately, only the very largest of companies are able to fully fund this costly move from hardwired infrastructure to the more effective, useful cloud.

Action Item: The vast majority (85 percent +) of IT organizations are going through a transformation process.  These initiatives are designed explicitly to be more response to business demands. Organizations not pursuing IT transformation initiatives are likely to become increasingly less competitive to their peers.

The biggest challenge getting IT-as-a-service as reported by Wikibon is “Shifting the consumption model from technology to services to the business,” due to the fact that IT organizations typically work on a project-by-project basis not one that delivers ongoing services over an extended length of time.

Action Item: ITO’s are competing for mindshare with cloud service providers that have a swipe-a-credit-card mentality for IT services.  Unlike CPSs however, ITOs can’t just simply ignore the one-offs, rather they must service a variety of business needs that can often slow progress.

ITOs must now create a default set of services for the IT-as-a-service business model.  When asked the question, “Which of these chargeback approaches does your organization use?” 39% of respondents replied that their company doesn’t do chargebacks of any kind.

Action Item: Most CIOs believe chargebacks are not worth the effort.  Nonetheless, organizations should consider so-called showback methods as a hybrid model that both supports an IT-as-a-service mentality, while at the same time rejecting the practical realities of running an IT organization.

Have cloud strategies changed this year?

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Wikibon asked respondents about their cloud computing strategies with the results being compared to the results from a 2011 Wikibon-conducted survey.  The question asked is: “Which of the following best describes your attitude towards cloud computing?” In 2011 6 percent responded that they were pursuing a public cloud strategy while in 2012 that number increased slightly to 8 percent.  In 2011 9 percent responded that they will use a hybrid of public and private clouds with an increase in 2012 to 33.7 percent.  Twenty-six percent in 2011 responded that they are just getting started pursuing cloud computing, with that number down to 15.5 percent in 2012 and 22 percent in 2011 cautious about public clouds but building a private one and 23 percent in 2012.  In 2011 22 percent responded that they have no clear plans in regards to cloud computing down to almost 14 percent in 2012 .  Lastly, in 2011 15 percent said that cloud computing is a buzzword with no clear meaning down to almost 6 percent this year.

Cloud services are being defined in 2012

These results make clear that last year, the cloud was still a new idea, one not yet embraced by all people, also making clear that 2012 is the year of the cloud.  Now that cloud services are being more defined, and are more in the public view (Amazon’s cloud service for example) people are more comfortable with the idea of using cloud storage and collaboration in the work place.  And as cloud security and encryption become more elaborate, more sensitive data will be safer in the cloud leading more businesses to enter into cloud computing.

Action Item:  By 2015 95 percent of organizations will have a clear cloud computing strategy and hybrid cloud deployment will predominate in mind-to-large companies.

What about DevOps?

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When asked “Which of the following best describes your attitude towards application modernization?” the majority of respondents felt that they are modernizing their applications using new tools, frameworks, and development platforms (36 percent).  While very few replied that there is disagreement about how to approach modernization in their business or organization (9 percent).  In between the two extremes at 23.6 percent are organizations that want to modernize, but unsure of the best path to do so.  This highlights the challenge that businesses are having today the question is not “do we have to,” with about 75 percent responding they know they need to, but the question is now “how do we?”

“Organizations pursuing DevOps in the Wikibon community report achieving hyper-productivity using the methodology.  While there are caveats of moving too fast and risks associated with software quality, DevOps is becoming the new Agile.”  While 42 percent replied that DevOps is new to them, 18 percent said that they’re looking into the concept, 15 percent said they are getting up to speed on DevOps with it being a possibility in the future.  Meanwhile 14 percent have just started to use the DevOps approach with 10 percent using it and achieving measurable productivity results.  These results show that DevOps is still a new development in the Wikibon community but that at “elite” web companies such as Google, Zynga, and Facebook it has become popular.

Action Item: The handoff from application development to infrastructure operations is slowing down IT and leading to chronic project delays.  Infrastructure professionals hack development’s work product and ‘break’ the code, often returning to development to provide a fix.

The back and forth is unproductive and should quicken the need to cross train developers and infrastructure professionals to make faster the deployment of new systems.  By investigating DevOps as being a feasible solution to speeding deployment while “preserving the integrity and quality that is requisite to infrastructure operations.”

Big Data Driving New Markets

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Big data is the new oil — Wikibon predicts that by 2017 the market will exceed $50 billion with big data practitioners creating more value than big data tech suppliers.  Yet, these practitioners are confused and the big data challenges that need to be overcome to alleviate this.  Figure 3 of the report details more the findings and the methodology for weighing the results, but each of the available responses when averaged out were close in the response.

Action Item: Practitioners should pursue Big Data initiatives by finding a line of business ‘sugar daddy’ that has the authority and means to access, package and go to market with data products.

Wikibon, as part of its ServicesAngle Partnership included some services-related questions and provided an analysis of the results.  In asking the respondents to name their primary service suppliers, the vast majority answered Microsoft, followed by EMC and HP, IBM, Oracle, NetApp and Dell.  Wikibon, like many, were not surprised to find that the majority of applications are those from Microsoft.

While many believe that outsourcing is done mostly to save money by reducing labor costs, instead Wikibon found in its’ survey that 36 percent of respondents replied that they hire outside firms for their expertise and knowledge, which then supplements the knowledge of employees.  Forty-two percent  replied that they only outsource when they have to, for instance maintenance contracts.  When asked what services would be outsourced, cloud strategy and deployment were high on the list, followed closely by big data strategy, security and trust issues, application development, cloud management, end use computing, application modernization, and training and education.  That these are all closely related to the cloud, and the challenges that the cloud brings highlights again that 2012 is the year of the cloud.

Cloud shifts into actualization

The results of this survey can be picked apart and disseminated in many ways, but it is undeniable that sometime in the future, when looking back at the year 2012 one thing will be clear — cloud computing went from being a really cool idea to actualization.  While the hard part is still lurking, moving entire companies into cloud computing, the baby steps are being taken with cloud security and data management solutions forming all leading in one direction, movement to the cloud.