As organisations are looking to move away from a traditional desktop IT environment to a more flexible one that caters for mobile, digital-savvy employees, the appeal of the agile workspace has grown.
An agile workspace gives users everything they need to work productively from any device at any location – including applications, shared data and documents, and self-service support.
However, stitching these elements together seamlessly is not an easy task, particularly as IT environments have grown in complexity.
Other significant barriers are company culture (39%) and misalignment between business and IT (36%), suggesting that there is still a lack of understanding between the boardroom and the CIO when it comes to digital priorities.
Furthermore, the pace of technological change (37%) and a lack of skills within existing IT teams (33%) are barriers for a significant number of organisations. However, the key takeaway from these results is that there is not just one hurdle for CIOs to surmount, there are instead a multitude of issues they must resolve to deliver an agile workspace.
It is perhaps not surprising that cost is such a challenge, when operational issues surrounding IT budgets present yet another barrier. Many organisations operate a fixed multi-year budget cycle, so IT investments in infrastructure, platforms, and applications, are often accounted for as capital expenditure (capex). This can restrict organisations in gaining the flexibility needed to scale usage up and down, and move towards a more dynamic (opex) operating model. When asked, 88% of CIOs stated that capex models are making it more difficult to create an agile workspace.
As these findings have outlined; to become user-centric and enable workspace agility, organisations have to move away from the traditional IT desktop model; giving employees access to all the applications and data they need, and empowering them to collaborate with colleagues over any connection.
For most, this is easier said than done. Companies are adopting cloud at varying speeds, and many organisations and sectors have made historical investments in IT that make migration challenging, at best.
Legacy applications in particular are a significant problem; 87% of CIOs agreed that legacy applications will slow their journey to an agile workspace.
Managing legacy applications is something many organisations struggle with, particularly when so many of those applications support business critical processes and systems.
In fact, the research shows that legacy applications are not just a barrier to creating agile workspaces but are actually delaying digital transformation of the entire organisation for more than half of respondents (56%).
A large number of enterprises are still dependent on these on-premise applications, which have been heavily customised and are not built to be delivered from a cloud infrastructure or as a cloud service.
Re-architecting and integrating applications is difficult work, and for many CIOs, this barrier is best overcome by seeking outside help and bringing in skilled application remediation experts from a third-party.