Eight in ten (81%) IT professionals in Europe believe their businesses are weighed down by un-used applications, which is placing cost burdens on organisations at an estimated amount of more than €2m per year, according to a new survey commissioned by Informatica.
Findings from the same research, which surveyed more than 600 IT, sales and marketing professionals, also showed that 32% of companies surveyed across France, Germany and the UK give all employees’ access and amendment rights to a variety of corporate databases and the data contained within them.
Research findings also demonstrated that sales and marketing departments are prone to side-stepping the IT department when it comes to adding new software and applications to existing systems.
97% of the IT professionals quizzed have said problems can occur when delivering timely data and/or analysis of data to business users within their organisation and more than a third (35%) of respondents blame user interference for the problems.
The most common hindrance cited is a lack of IT resources to handle the volume of requests (46%) and this is followed closely by infrastructure complexity at 42%
Almost as many (40%) complain of a too-diverse array of databases across the organisation, while the same amount takes issue with the incompatibility of these resources
Content from our partners
This problem is especially common in Germany (45%), compared to France (31%), while companies with more than 1,000 employees suffer more in many of these respects
Informatica EMEA technology vice president Mark Seager said, through chaotic and inconsistent approaches to how data is managed across the enterprise, companies increasingly have to ‘mind the data gap’.
"If data exists ad hoc across the enterprise, but organisations can’t integrate it in order to generate a single view of their customers, then they’re missing out on significant market and revenue growth opportunities," Seager said.
Among those questioned, 75% of IT professionals said their company has at least some applications on the corporate network that have not been used in the last three years.
On average, amongst these companies, these applications represent a quarter (25%) of the total number of applications on the system.
Among IT professionals with unused applications on the corporate network, 91% admit that at least some of these have data associated with them.
Still 34% of these are unsure about the proportion of unused applications that have data associated with them
46% say the company will not remove these applications or their databases in case they are needed at a later date
Another 26% think they may be needed for compliance reasons
