Gartner: IT suppliers heading for breaking point

Analyst warns that firms, including IT suppliers, must embrace intense change or risk faltering

In just three years’ time, 80 per cent of IT organisations will reach resource breaking point as pressure to deliver technology projects on time increases, Gartner has claimed.

According to the market watcher, many organisations are not well structured to cope with the intense levels of change and advancement in IT, and will be forced to alter how project resources are allocated and managed, with programme and portfolio management (PPM) leaders forced to tackle the changed environment directly.

While the exact forms of resource management innovation have yet to be determined, they will fall into one of two camps: incremental and dramatic, Gartner said.

Incremental will build on existing best practices and include the use of strategic partners, but dramatic innovation will be quite different from current models, the analyst said.

It is likely that an open-source model will be used, where users self-select projects to work on, and project leaders approve these self-selected resources based on "reputonics", which sees their reputation codified in social software profiles.

Robert Handler, vice president at Gartner, said: “The level of uncertainty and change is at an all-time high. The force of this change and uncertainty on PPM leaders necessitates constant adjustment and realignment of organisational roles, capabilities and mind sets to succeed within the continuously evolving "new normal".

"Constant innovation and change are required if organisations are to deliver the value required by stakeholders and sponsors,” he said.

Gartner also predicted that by 2016, the leading 20 per cent of organisations in IT-intensive businesses will plan change using integrated, near real-time IT portfolio analysis. This means IT leaders will need to make decisions faster, while understanding the broader impacts of those decisions across the IT value chain. Those who adapt will attain or maintain market leadership, Gartner claimed. Those who do not, will falter.

Another of the analyst's predictions is that by 2016, demand for agile project leaders will increase by 75 per cent. The demand for pure-play project managers will decline, as project leaders are expected to demonstrate domain expertise and transformational leadership skills.