Survey: Integration costs still hamper agility

06.02.2006
If application integration remains the last bastion of business agility, IT managers and CIOs are laying the blame squarely on the high cost of software and services for the slow pace of improvement in 2005.

In a survey of 100 CIOs and IT managers from 84 Australian companies by software vendor Intersystems, 67 percent answered 'yes' to whether strategic integration projects have been held back due to excessive software and services costs. The perceived high cost of both software and services are similar at 52 and 48 percent, respectively.

Conducted at last year's SEARCC conference in Sydney, the survey also revealed that 67 percent of most recently completed projects delivered the target ROI, up from 54 percent in the previous year.

Salvation Army IT manager Larry Reed, a participant in the survey, agreed that integration is inhibited by cost, particularly services.

"We get good value out of software because we do due diligence first, but services tend to be significantly more expensive than we expect," Reed told Computerworld. "Integration of applications is a significant strategic direction that is inhibited by cost."

The Salvation Army has a number of applications - like property management, finance, HR, and helpdesk - that Reed would like to see integrated to streamline business processes and improve productivity.