UK IT Leaders Urged To "Innovate" To Keep Pace With Business Demands

80 per cent of UK IT managers have admitted there is a wide gap between what business managers desire and the ability of IT deliver it with the British Isles leading the way across the whole continent.

A survey that was commissioned by VMware found that the UK has one of the largest gaps in the whole of Europe with numbers for the remainder of the continent showing that just 65 per cent believe there is a wide gap.

“We didn’t survey this but I think we’ll see the gap get bigger. I think it will get worse before it gets better”, but he was not willing to put a time-scale on this,” VMware UK regional director David Parry-Jones told CloudPro.

It didn’t end there as certain IT departments that were identified by the survey admitted that the gap is even larger with 25 per cent of those asked stating it will take IT between seven and 18 months to catch up on what businesses require.

Vanson Bourne, the company tasked with carrying out the survey, found the biggest challenge facing IT departments in the current climate is cost reduction. This is such a challenge as cost cuts are being sought even though IT departments are being asked to make the workforce more mobile and move infrastructure into the cloud.

IT managers are also extremely concerned that companies not innovating will find it hard to keep pace with more agile competitors that invest more time and money in being more innovative.

Parry-Jones, commenting further on the survey, did add that there was a greater willingness to spend money on innovation ahead of anything else so that firms can use the new technology to improve the performance of the firm as a whole.