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"These findings highlight the vital role that IT and technology now play for today’s businesses. Businesses can only progress and perform as quickly as IT enables them to — it’s business at the speed of IT," said Suaad Sait, executive vice president, products and markets, SolarWinds. "Empowering IT — especially to successfully adopt and implement new technologies quickly — should be a top priority for every organization. This will become more important as we move further into the hybrid cloud era. The cloud offers tremendous opportunity to streamline business and reduce costs, yet, as the study finds, three out of five organizations have migrated less than 25 percent of their infrastructure and one in ten have not migrated anything. IT must be given the resources they need to make this transition. Otherwise their businesses may suffer."

Key Findings

IT and IT’s ability to successfully adopt significant new technologies is critical to long-term business success. The new measures of IT performance are not just availability, reliability and uptime — but also business productivity, growth and profitability. However, barriers and challenges, including, for some, business leadership, continue to stall adoption and therefore business impact.

Nearly all — 93 percent — of IT professionals who responded to the survey indicated that adopting significant new technologies is at least somewhat important to their organization’s long-term success; of those, 48 percent said it is important and another 20 percent said it is extremely important
Budget limitations ranked as the top barrier to adopting those significant new technologies, followed by inability to convince decision makers of the need and/or benefit and a shortage of IT personnel to implement and/or manage the technology, respectively

While 66 percent of survey-takers indicated they view their organizations’ CIO as an enabler in adopting significant new technologies, nearly one-quarter said their CIO is either a barrier or uninvolved
Without empowering IT to effectively overcome these barriers, organizations struggle to achieve expected results from technology adoption within anticipated timeframes, and to ensure overall business-critical technology performance.

More than half of IT professionals surveyed said it took longer than anticipated — 23 percent said much longer — for the last significant new technology their organization adopted to start impacting business and/or end-user efficiency
Only half of the survey-takers said their organizations’ last adoption of a significant new technology achieved expected return on investment within the projected timeframe; while one-third said it took longer than expected — 11 percent of those said it took much longer
Nearly 90 percent of respondents said their organizations’ end-users were negatively affected by a performance or availability issue with business-critical technology in the past 12 months; nearly a quarter of those reported that such issues occurred six times or more
To better empower IT to overcome these barriers and drive the success of their businesses through technology adoption, organizations must first provide IT with more resources, better training and development and greater autonomy.

Nearly 50 percent of survey-takers said more resources, such as budget, personnel and time, ranked as their number one need to feel more empowered
More or better training and development (32 percent), greater IT department autonomy (29 percent), stronger CIO support when liaising with other business leaders (26 percent) and more or better strategic counsel and guidance from the CIO (24 percent) rounded out the list of IT’s top five needs ranked number one by IT professionals surveyed

The annual SolarWinds IT Trends Report consists of survey-based research that explores significant trends, developments and movements related to and directly affecting IT and IT professionals. The findings of this year’s report are based on a survey fielded in December 2014, which yielded responses from 231 IT practitioners, managers and directors in the U.S. and Canada from public and private sector small, mid-size and enterprise companies.