Acceptance and Use

Software eats up IT budgets

A study titled "IT's Big, Expensive Software Problems" shows how little insight IT departments have into employee adoption and use of software applications. For example, 22 percent of IT executives surveyed said the level of overall spending on software was their most pressing issue, while 13 percent cited shadow IT (employee use of unapproved applications and services).

In addition to these top priorities, it became clear: IT decision-makers estimate that employees have between 11 and 50 applications in use every day, but they are not sure how many of them are actively used and how many licenses are available. Only five percent of respondents said they had a complete overview of how many employees in total were using company-approved applications.

Conversely, this means that about 95 percent of IT leaders have no visibility into whether employees are using the tools provided to them. Third-party software as a service (SaaS) and custom web applications account for the vast majority of IT troubleshooting.

In response to the question "How true is the following statement? Issues with third-party SaaS or custom web applications account for the majority of our employees' IT troubleshooting", 75 percent said this statement was somewhat or very true. When it comes to mergers and acquisitions, only six percent of IT leaders are very confident they can balance consolidating employee hardware and application licenses with improving productivity.