APPLICATIONS PRIORITIES 25

Moving from trends to priorities

Understand the applications priorities by analyzing both how applications leaders respond to trends in general and how specific applications leaders responded in the context of their organization.

APPLICATIONS PRIORITIES 2025

01 Digital Products
Deliver engaging and valuable user, customer, employee, and brand experiences with digital products.

02 Platform Management & Orchestration
Create accessible, scalable, and reliable infrastructure, tools, and services that users need to efficiently deliver and manage solutions.

03 Democratized AI
Extend AI access and configuration to everyone in your organization.

04 Broad Data Access
Expand the availability of enterprise data sources and analysis solutions.

05 End-to-End Business Process Optimization
Scale business automation by optimizing the roles, processes, and technologies that matter.

Analyst Perspective

People want more control over their technologies. But a deal must be struck with IT.

The growing demand for greater user empowerment of business technologies should not be a surprise to leaders. Users are more conscious of data privacy and security, so they want greater control over their personal information. They demand more transparency in their solution's algorithms and the training data it accesses. Increased digital literacy within the business coupled with intuitive low- and no-code capabilities remove many blockers to customized interfaces, processes, and integrations. Vendors are readily available to give users the software, platforms, data, AI, and automations business users need with the controls they want without the involvement of IT. Users are more than happy to, and will, pay these vendors whether organizations are accepting of them or not.

Rather than fighting the losing battle with shadow IT, embrace the democratization of IT. While this shift in technology enablement and accountability can foster innovation and flexibility, stakeholders need the right governance framework, guidance, and IT oversight to mitigate these risks. However, nothing is free. Leaders must strike a deal between user empowerment and freedom with proper IT controls, policies, and standards. After all, with great power comes great responsibility.

Andrew Kum-Seun
Research Director, Applications
Info-Tech Research Group

Align your priorities to your strategic objectives

Applications are critical components in any business strategic plan. They can directly influence an organization's:

• Ability to be dynamic, flexible, and responsive to changing expectations, business conditions, and technologies.
• Value proposition, branding, and reputation in the industry through competitive and engaging products and services.
• Acceptance and embrace of leading-edge and disruptive technologies.

Organizational leaders must continuously look for innovative ways to better position their application portfolios and delivery practices. This is done through applications priorities. These priorities must be carefully crafted to clearly state achievable business outcomes that satisfy the different needs of customers, stakeholders, and users.

MAINTAIN BUSINESS-IT ALIGNMENT WITH AN IT STRATEGY.

An IT strategy illustrates the alignment of your technology initiatives with your strategic objectives. This document helps:

• Optimize resource allocation and budgeting.
• Raise the impact and mitigations to address IT risks, including cybersecurity.
• Illustrate the feasibility, flexibility and adaptability of IT and enterprise systems.

To learn more, see Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy.

Today's business applications are good but leave room for improvement.

75%

Mean satisfaction scores of business applications among business leaders.

Source: Info-Tech's CIO Business Vision Diagnostic, August 2023 to July 2024; n=281

Address your applications disruptors

What we are facing today is transforming the ways in which we work, live, and relate to one another. Applications teams and portfolios MUST change to meet this reality.

• Exponential technologies. Many modern technologies, such as generative AI, are evolving at an accelerated pace and are doubling their performance, use cases, and impact within shorter time frames. Users are adopting these technologies faster than organizations can react. ChatGPT, for example, took five days to reach one million users in 2022, and Threads took one hour in 2023 (Exploding Topics, 2024).
• Artificial intelligence (AI). The recent spike in AI maturity has turned AI into a viable organizational enabler, thanks to the many successful implementations across the industry. Organizations are doubling down on their AI investments to enable scaled adoption. In fact, 70% of organizations consistently invest in AI solutions to improve quality processes (Sogeti, 2023).
• Democratized IT. Users want the ability to build, configure, and extend their solutions with seamless access to key enterprise systems and unrestricted integrations with third-party services. Low-code/no-code and software as a service are two of the popular enablers.
• Security risks. IT is expected to keep up to date on the latest security trends and tactics, but the increased sophistication and volume of attack vectors are overwhelming. Data breach, business email compromise, and system compromise were the top three most frequently experienced incidents in the past two years (Splunk, 2024).

2025 will be disruptive

Respondents identified the top factors that will likely disrupt business in the next 12 months

1. Talent shortage
2. Artificial intelligence
3. Cybersecurity incidents
4. Government policy or regulatory changes
5. Changing customer behavior

Source: Tech Trends 2025, Info-Tech Research Group; n=695

AI is the way of working

92% of US-based programmers were reported using AI coding tools both in and outside of work.

Source: GitHub, 2023; n=500

Overcome the challenges standing in your team's way

Applications teams are under increasing pressure from the business to deliver quickly and consistently. However, teams are often ill-equipped and misled to meet this expectation. Stakeholders must invest in the alleviation of inefficiencies and critical gaps in application delivery and management to effectively deliver business value.

WHAT ARE THE TOP CHALLENGES EXPERIENCED BY OUR MEMBERS?

1 Addressing technical debt

2 Improving data quality

3 Embracing organizational change

Challenge 1:
Addressing technical debt

Technical debt stunts organizational growth.

Unmanageable technical debt is the inevitable consequence of poor decisions in ongoing product delivery and maintenance. The rapid evolution of technology and the increasing reliance on digital platforms have made it crucial to understand and manage technical debt to continue high throughput and sustainable delivery.

Technical debt is the future cost of refactoring and improving software systems due to deliberate earlier design, development, and deployment decisions. Failure to properly manage technical debt can lead to inefficient systems that are difficult to maintain and upgrade, posing significant challenges in a fast-paced technological environment.

ADDRESS THE UNDERLYING ROOT CAUSES

• Lack of architectural, integration, and system quality standards lead to the proliferation of siloed and inconsistent managed systems.
• Existing system diagrams do not show the scope and impact of technology sprawl, the organizational risk footprint, functional dependencies, and operational costs.
• Little business appetite to invest in system modernization and refactoring efforts (why fix when it is not broken?).
• Business and IT have low tolerance to shift resources away from new development.

WHAT IF THE CHALLENGE IS LEFT UNADDRESSED?

• Transactions and processes executed by debt-burdened systems are slow, brittle, and unreliable.
• Systems are not compliant with updated security and industry standards.
• Maintenance and system updates are resource-intensive and costly.
• Inability to effectively complement systems with modern functionalities.

Technical debt is an industry-wide concern

77& of organizations have enterprise-wide initiatives in place to address technical debt.

Source: vFunction, 2024; n=1,037 US-based respondents.

51% of organizations dedicate more than a quarter of their total annual IT/engineering budget to remediating technical debt.

Source: vFunction, 2024; n=1,037 US-based respondents.

Challenge 2:
Improving data quality

Data is a strategic asset, but it is not treated as such.

Organizations need to make decisions at every capacity. Many are turning to their vast quantities of data to drive accurate and responsive decision-making. However:

• Data is outdated, undefined and resides in multiple data silos.
• The mechanisms needed to validate and clean data are not present or effective.
• Data analysis and intelligence tools are poorly configured to handle high data volumes and do not generate usable insight and reports.

Addressing data quality challenges requires an ongoing commitment to data governance, standardized data entry, and quality control processes, often supported by tools for data cleaning, validation, and monitoring.

ADDRESS THE UNDERLYING ROOT CAUSES

• Data platforms (e.g. data warehouses) are incapable of handling the vast amounts of data at high speeds.
• Data is stored in various, unconnected systems or departments.
• Current tools are unable to process different structured, semi-structured and unstructured data formats.
• Different departments use different formats and naming conventions for similar data fields.
• Lack of an organization-wide data strategy and management approach.

WHAT IF THE CHALLENGE IS LEFT UNADDRESSED?

• Inaccurate analysis and flawed insights that lead to misguided and misinformed business decisions.
• The high costs from identifying and correcting errors in poorly managed data and processes lead to financial losses.
• Noncompliance with industry regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA and SOX, leading to fines, penalties, and reputational damage.
• Poor data quality skews the predictions and recommendations of AI solutions.

Poor quality data deteriorates the value that is generated from it

67% of respondents don't completely trust the data used by their organization for decision-making.

Source: Precisely, 2024; n=565

88% of respondents reported that their data is not AI-ready.

Source: Precisely, 2024; n=565

Challenge 3:
Embracing organizational change

Change does not happen without leadership and a supportive culture.

The transition to digital, intelligent technologies involves replacing legacy systems with modern, more efficient solutions and optimizing processes to take full advantage of those solutions. This initiative often presents significant business and technical risks to role definitions, business processes, enterprise data, applications, and systems, which stakeholders and teams may not be aware of, bought into, or prepared to accommodate.

ADDRESS THE UNDERLYING ROOT CAUSES

• Unproven and experimental changes create fear, uncertainty, and doubt within the organization, leading people in key roles to be reluctant to adopt them.
• Job security concerns if technology or operational changes appear to take over their core responsibilities and accountabilities.
• Discomfort adopting changes that challenge cultural norms and the status quo.
• Lack of training, onboarding, and support for proposed changes.
• Organizational leaders are not transparent about the rationale for organizational changes and do not provide the necessary comfort to ease the change.

WHAT IF THE CHALLENGE IS LEFT UNADDRESSED?

• Proposed changes are limited to superficial and isolated changes. Local optimizations do not benefit the broader organization.
• Dismissing new and different practices and technologies that better support the entire organization.
• Teams revert to the previous way of working when discomfort comes up.
• Employees are distrustful of organizational leaders and may be active participants in derailing future changes.

Organizations are not prepared for change

43% of employees agree that their place of work is not prepared to effectively manage change.

Source: Oak Engage, 2023; n=1,035 UK employees

Leadership is disconnected from their employees

74% of employees think leaders need to be doing more to understand why people are resistant to change.

Source: Oak Engage, 2023; n=1,035 UK employees