NEW YORK – A confluence of plummeting prices, escalating labor requirements and an ever-increasing level of complexity is preventing the enterprise from extracting the full value out of their IT investments, almost to the point that the CIO (Chief Information Officer) has become resigned to accept a more menial role within the organization.

 

In his Interop speech, John Swainson, President and CEO of CA Inc. (News - Alert), explained that while falling prices have accelerated device (servers, routers, etc.) proliferation, application support costs have also risen in the wake of escalating labor requirements. But even though the proportion of IT employees has grown in recent years, it is still well-documented that there aren’t enough people in the work force with the necessary skills to address the growing problems of IT complexity.

 

“If you're betting on more employees to solve the problem of complexity, I will give you fairly low odds,” Swainson said.

 

As a result, the CA Inc. chief official attested that roughly only one-fifth of the IT budget goes toward business transformation – what IT was meant to address in the first place.

 

“Most IT budgets leave their companies running in place,” he said. “A CIO is not there to manage IT...the CIO is supposed to be a transformational figure.”

 

While Swainson concluded in his speech that “simplicity” will be the “next big thing,” his observations are still consistent with those of other leading experts that advocate securing and managing the IT infrastructure disproportionately outweigh budgets.

 

For example, a recent survey of 400 IT professionals and decision-makers conducted in April found that businesses continue to devote an inordinate amount of time and expense to IT management and maintenance instead of on core business issues. Yet, IT “pain points” continue to manifest themselves within the organization.

 

While 99 percent of IT decision-makers and 100 percent of IT pros who responded to the survey report that “reliability” is still the most crucial consideration in their company’s desktop PC strategy, 66 percent of decision-makers and 56 percent of IT pros found PC management difficult and 78 percent of decision-makers and 66 percent of IT pros sometimes have remote management problems. The study was conducted in April at organizations with 50 or more PCs and commissioned by Intel (News - Alert).

 

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.