As the enterprise performance crisis pushes IT investments back to the top of IT leadership concerns, we ran three surveys aimed at understanding where the market is at with respect to IT investment strategies.
The questions, asked during the live webinar, Why Integrated IT Portfolio Management Matters, conducted on July 29th, 2014, focused on the key issues shaping today’s IT investment strategies.
The first poll asked about the factors contributing to an organization’s struggles with respect to digital investment models. 37% of respondents believe that agile investment and resource allocation is key to the success of the IT investments. UMT360 believes this is one of most underused drivers of effective IT investments, and our research shows that high-performing organizations are more likely to focus on this area of investment management agility. But this agility isn’t possible without portfolio integration and financial maturity. Without this foundation, organizations will struggle to achieve the dynamic reallocation and optimization of investments.
The second poll asked attendees to describe how their company currently uses tools to manage IT investments. 63% use different and disconnected tools to manage investments in projects and 19% use a PPM tool to manage projects and programs only. When you add in the 9% that don’t use any tool to manage IT investments, there is an opportunity for 91% of the organizations polled to more effectively manage their IT investments and drive more value.
While we concluded with poll 1 that organizations desire to be agile, they don’t have the tools to support this vision. A dynamic, agile IT investment strategy has baseline requirements – portfolio integration, financial maturity, and roadmaps for a product-based investment approach.
Lastly, we asked attendees which factor they consider to be the most important when it comes to implementing Digital Investment strategies? The poll responses show a balanced attention on the first top four enterprise investment factors (organization, innovation, control and digital enabled EPM investment model). It is encouraging to discover that participants understand that the viability of a company depends on its ability to innovate (26%.).
The results tell us that organizational factors (organization and control accounting for 48%) are among the toughest leadership issues in managing the IT investments. We know that the need to clarify them is consistently underestimated.
