If 28 percent of IT budgets (and growing) are going toward transforming operations, is this investment paying off? In short, yes. Our data shows that the vast majority of organisations report a wide range of benefits as a direct result of their investment in operations throughout the past year. Respondents see benefits (often “significant” benefits) in external customer experience, innovation, and responsiveness — outcomes that any transformational CIO would seek. Predictive and preemptive organisations reported even stronger benefits.
The positive impact of IT operations on the business goes beyond simply delivering infrastructure well (for example, better system availability would tend to make for happier customers). It also comes from the business making direct use of IT operations data. Already 40 percent of respondents say their organisations rely “heavily” on IT operations data to make business decisions. The potential use cases for applying operational data to business decisions are endless, everything from optimising a retail store layout by analysing Wi-Fi traffic to improving team productivity by analysing the adoption and utilisation of collaboration tools. Ambitious IT leaders will use operational data to forge closer relationships with their business stakeholders.