Duplication of technology for internal service delivery, and over-reliance on manual processes, is costing UK businesses up to £1.52 billion, according to an independent survey of CIOs.
More than three quarters (76%) of the CIOs quizzed stated that other business areas are failing to apply service management best practices and tools that are already in use by IT.
The survey found that despite investments already made in IT service management, businesses are spending an additional average of £750,000 on technology to automate the delivery of services for other standard corporate functions, such as HR and facilities.
Taking into account the estimated £150,000 expenditure that would be required to implement their existing technology into non-IT functions, the combined waste amongst large UK enterprises totals £1.52 billion.
>See also: 21% of tech investments now take place outside IT budget – Gartner CIO survey
To combat this waste, an overwhelming majority of CIOs (98%) said that other departments can take a lead from corporate IT, and benefit from extending technology used for IT service management to other areas of service delivery.
“Clearly, CIOs feel that they have a lot to offer the business, but are finding it hard to get through to other departments who do not apparently value IT’s experience,” said Paul Cash, MD atFruition Partners UK, which commissioned the study. “Indeed, 37% of CIOs think the majority of other business areas do not believe they can learn from IT.
“However, IT departments and CIOs have been delivering technology-driven service for many years and have a service-oriented mind-set as a result. The consumerisation of IT means that users want a consistent, user-friendly experience at work like they get in their personal lives.
“There is an opportunity to achieve this by adopting best practice from IT, creating a better use of resources and happier users, rather than individual departments struggling alone.”
Because of the current fragmented nature of service delivery and the lack of best practice adoption, only 5% of CIOs in the study could say the way that users interact with different internal service providers is consistent.
However, a large majority of them (92%) said users would like to see a more consistent service and a central place to gain access to internal services.
The research revealed that 78% of organisations are not fully utilising self-service technologies that IT has invested in across other business areas that could benefit.
While 91% of CIOs have implemented self-service and knowledge portals for some IT service management functions, many other areas of the business still use a manual approach for day-to-day processes.
>See also: The 2015 CIO agenda
Indeed, 84% of CIOs said that other business areas are too manual in their provision of day-to-day services.
Measuring and monitoring the satisfaction of users is another area in which corporate IT shows its maturity. Almost three quarters (72%) of CIOs said that they currently carry out IT user satisfaction surveys. However, that figure was less than half for HR departments (46%), only a third for facilities (33%), and even less for marketing (27%).
Taken together, these figures further underline that IT is far in advance of other departments when it comes to service delivery and improving user experience.
