Report: IT departments hurt by misaligned application priorities

Many IT service management professionals feel the applications used by their organization for day-to-day tasks are a bad fit, limiting their operational efficiency, according to a CIO Magazine study.

Close to two-thirds of IT decision-makers polled by the publication said that poor organization made it impossible for them to accurately describe their portfolio's total cost of ownership. Half noted that there was either excessive or moderate duplication in their software stables.

Just 35 percent of respondents to the Fujitsu-sponsored research said their organizations' application portfolios were completely aligned with operational goals, implying that the others may be overspending as a result of the inefficiency.

"This is not only because maintenance of applications is costly, but because unnecessarily large numbers of applications increase calls to help desks, increase security risks, make it harder to implement business intelligence (because of multiple data sources) and increase the risk of noncompliance to standards and software licensing agreements," the publication said.

This strongly implies that software asset management software could quickly become a crucial tool for ITSM teams in the near future.