The High Cost of the Growing IT Delivery Gap

By Tony Kontzer | Posted 2017-04-18

1 of

The High Cost of the Growing IT Delivery Gap

As the gulf widens between expectations of IT and IT's ability to deliver, tech leaders are looking at new strategies to make the most of emerging technologies.
The Digital Imperative

88% of the IT decision-makers responding to the survey said they are already executing on digital transformation initiatives or will be within the next three years.
Expecting Agility

77% hope that digital transformation will improve existing business processes.
Spotty Delivery

Only 49% of the respondents said they were able to deliver on all projects asked of them in 2016.
Disparity in Expectations

69% said there is a disparity between what business executives expect a digital initiative to accomplish and what actually can be delivered.
IT Priorities

Security: 84%, Cloud applications: 81%, Integration: 74%, Analytics: 71%, Augmented or virtual reality: 70%
Business Impact

45% of the IT decision-makers said that the disparity between what the business expects and what IT can deliver was responsible for slowing down their businesses in 2016.
Deficient Resources

51% said they are under-resourced, and only 32% expect their budgets to increase by 10% or more.
Integration Explodes

35% of the respondents said they will integrate 100 or more applications this year—a 250% increase from a year earlier—highlighting growing IT complexity.
APIs Deliver

90% of respondents have an API strategy or are planning to launch one this year. Of those who already have one, 94% credit it with enabling them to deliver products and services faster.
A Growing Shadow

56% of respondents said their company has adopted more than 20 applications outside of the IT department, and 49% said that more than 20% of their tech spend goes to investments outside of IT's purview.
View All Slideshows >

The current wave of innovative technologies—from mobile and the internet of things to the cloud, analytics and artificial intelligence—is pushing business and employees to move at much faster speeds. But with IT still limited to a relatively fixed set of resources and facing constraints on the ability to deliver on new projects, an IT delivery gap is threatening to hold back business. Such is the takeaway of a recent survey, "Connectivity Benchmark Report 2017," from cloud integration platform provider MuleSoft. In surveying 951 IT decision-makers from global companies that employ more than 500 people, MuleSoft discovered that these pressures have spurred IT departments to turn to APIs to meet their integration needs, enable self-service IT and unlock data silos. "The IT delivery gap is one of the biggest threats to businesses today, as speed and real-time access now help determine a business' success," said Ross Mason, founder and vice president of product strategy for MuleSoft. "In order to deliver products faster to market, establish new global presences and change existing processes to meet market demands, we're seeing our customers increasingly invest in and benefit from an API-led approach to connectivity. Driving an internal API economy allows IT to securely open up legacy systems and free business-critical data that the wider organization relies on to achieve business outcomes faster than the competition."

Tony Kontzer has been writing about the intersection of technology and business for more than 20 years.