IT Leaders in Difficult Balancing Act Between Pandemic-Induced Operational Priorities And Urgent Need To Innovate

Mendix, a Siemens business and the global leader in enterprise low-code, released a survey that shows the COVID-19 pandemic is placing IT leaders in a precarious and challenging position of needing to keep the business running while accelerating digital transformation initiatives, all with fewer resources. The global study of 1,000 IT leaders, conducted in May 2020 during the height of the lockdown, paints a picture of the challenges faced by IT as companies work to establish a new normal.

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Lockdown has forced many companies to pivot the way they do business, with IT leaders in particular, playing a crucial role in ensuring a distributed workforce is supported and businesses continue to function. While most IT departments already had business continuity plans in place before the COVID-19 crisis, including provisions for remote working (70 percent), almost half of IT leader respondents (43 percent) found themselves shifting at least part of their mission to better support remote work streams outside of IT, as workforces started operating in a new, 100 percent virtual environment. This mandate for home working has meant over half of companies (54 percent) are accelerating their digitalization, including expanding cloud adoption for 62 percent of respondents. This abrupt shift to remote work brought on by the pandemic has provided a compulsory testing ground for a more agile and connected workforce, with digital transformation at its heart.

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Despite this shift, the need to readjust priorities to support remote workstreams poses challenges to business innovation. Seventy percent of respondents report having to put IT projects on hold due to the lockdown, in part because of budget constraints (32 percent) or a reduction in team size and skillset (19 percent). For close to a third (31 percent) of respondents, the need to support remote working has resulted in more than half of the IT team’s time being spent solving challenges linked to this new way of working.

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