Against this backdrop it is unsurprising that financial businesses are also finding it increasingly difficult to prioritize application problems and/or service requests.  Indeed 87% of the financial businesses surveyed admitted they found prioritization a challenge. At the same time, with IT underpinning a number of business functions, 89% of respondents said that resource and skills restraints were making it difficult to align business and IT objectives.  Only a small percentage (11%) of organizations stated they have mapped business benefit from IT.

“ASM represents a disproportionately large proportion of IT spend. Many organizations are struggling to meet users’ heightened expectations of application performance, which in turn is leading to a growing number of support tickets,” said Vijay B. Iyer, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Applications Outsourcing, HCL Technologies. “With the need to drive greater efficiencies and business value from IT, organizations can no longer allow their current ASM functions to stagnate. By taking a more proactive and efficient approach they can free up capital that could be allocated towards more innovative transformational projects.”

Running the business v changing the business

The survey highlights how financial sector organizations are currently dividing their IT spend between ‘keeping the lights on’ and delivering business transformation:

• On average, more than half (67%) of annual IT budgets are spent on running the business (RTB)
• 98% believed that budgetary pressures were hindering their ability to undertake business transformation projects
• 89% stated it was priority for them to reduce the proportion of their organization’s IT budget on RTB, so they can invest more in transforming the business through innovative technology projects
• 83% indicated they didn’t expect their existing ASM function (in-house, outsourced or combined) to deliver any cost savings in the next three years.

Lack of incentive to change existing ASM processes

53% of financial sector organizations stated ASM was managed in-house, whilst 18% outsourced this function.  The remaining 29% stated that ASM was carried out by both an in-house team and an outsourcer.  Irrespective of how ASM was undertaken, the survey highlighted that one of the biggest barrier towards reducing ASM costs is a reluctance to disrupt the current status quo:

• Of those financial sector organizations who outsourced part or all of their ASM function, 76% believed that their outsourcer could be more innovative in delivering ASM, but were reluctant to do so because it may right result in reduced work and revenue
• 62% believed that their outsourcer tries to keep the level of support tickets high to ensure the fees paid to them cannot be reduced
• Of those financial sector organizations that undertake ASM in house, 97% believed their team could be more innovative in transforming the model of ASM.

ASM remains too reactive and siloed, leading to inefficiencies

The survey illustrated that in the vast majority of financial sector organizations, ASM is reactive and focused on firefighting, as opposed to delivering real business value.  Furthermore, for most financial sector organizations ASM continues to be aligned to particular applications as opposed to the business, which is symptomatic of IT working to IT-led rather than business-led KPIs:

• The majority of CIOs (87%) believed that traditional ASM processes are inefficient as they deal with and resolve application incidents on a case-by-case basis, rather than using an industrialized and consistent solution
• 63% stated that their ASM function was inflexible in supporting business expansion and is not providing continuous improvement
• 91% of companies organized their ASM function around application silos
• 87% stated that a small number of applications created a disproportionally high number of ASM tickets
• 98% said root-cause analysis was taking longer due to the increasingly complex nature of the IT landscape.

“The traditional IT-KPI focused approach towards ASM is fast becoming outdated.  CIOs need to be able to drive costs out of their operations, while at the same time drive business performance.  This can be enabled by using business-focused KPIs, yet our survey reveals that less than half of organizations use such metrics.  It is clear an alternative approach is required for an IT function that hasn’t evolved for the last decade, added Vijay B. Iyer.

The survey of 45 CIOs from the financial services industry was conducted as part of a broader survey of 300 UK and US CIOs at large enterprises with 1,000+ employees. The survey was commissioned by HCL Technologies and conducted by independent research company Vanson Bourne.