Businesses wait five months for IT requests

VMware in attempt to quantify and describe degree of business-IT misalignment

It takes five months on average for IT departments to deliver demands made of them by UK businesses, according to a poll by VMware.

VMware organised Vanson Bourne to survey 1,800 IT decision makers and 3,600 office workers at businesses across EMEA in an attempt to explore the degree of misalignment between business needs and IT – a phenomenon where anecdotes abound but little hard data has been produced.

Joe Baguley, chief EMEA technology officer at VMware, presenting the survey to press at the vendor's annual vForum event, said that five months was the average time gap – although the lag could be much larger in public sector organisations, and longer in the UK as well.

"A lag of almost half a year between what the business expects of IT and what it can deliver is huge. We cannot underplay the pressure IT departments face in this new mobile cloud era as they balance a need to maximise value from existing systems against the necessity to deploy new technologies," he said.

"We're hearing time and again that businesses see IT as a driver of innovation. It has to be part of the future, not part of the furniture."

That means being able to scale up and down as well as respond quickly to requests. Crucially, it also means that IT professionals must learn more about the businesses in which they work and become a lot more proactive in suggesting solutions to problems, or changes that can drive business benefit, he suggested.