Cloud-native strategies pushing purchase decisions beyond IT

IT loosens the purse strings

ESG surveyed 368 IT professionals in the U.S. and Canada to better understand how IT departments are moving to distributed clouds and how the migration to this new ecosystem has affected their budgeting and purchasing processes.

ESG analysts noted that although influencers might make strong suggestions, senior IT management still tends to be the final decision-maker for on-premises infrastructure. In the survey, 54% of respondents named that group as the owner of the purchase decision, followed by IT management (22%) and IT operations (8%). Other groups, including line-of-business leadership and cybersecurity, were in the low single digits (Figure 1). Purchases of on-premises applications follow a similar pattern.

Purchases of public cloud services, however, show a subtle shift in buying roles. While senior management was cited as the decider by a majority of respondents (57%), the involvement of cloud architecture and operations teams – not surprisingly -- was comparable to that of IT operations, at 8% and 7%, respectively.

Collaboration challenges, and some solutions

Survey respondents reported a strong level of collaboration between IT and LOB groups, with 47% saying they collaborate on a regular basis and the same percentage reporting that collaboration occurs as needed (Figure 2).

Collaboration is somewhat more frequent between IT and application development teams, which ESG attributes in part to a modern approach to cloud-native development. The collaboration between IT and application development is affecting buying decisions, the survey found. DevOps and platform engineering teams increasingly make spending decisions for development tools, albeit funded from budgets that are still set by senior IT management.

The survey report also noted that IT and app dev groups have made progress in improving the collaboration that is so necessary for cloud-native development, including more use of collaboration tools, more processes that rely on team collaboration and better sharing of data and resources across teams. But respondents said challenges persist, citing a wide range of inhibitors to collaboration between IT and development teams, including a lack of clear agendas, excessive reviews and iterations, vague requests and too many tools.

To address these issues, the analysts offered the following recommendations:

• Identify and define common goals. Provide visibility into the plans and goals of the various teams and foster teamwork through regular meetings. Use collaboration tools, but be careful not to have too many.
• Align skills development across teams. Train IT to have a basic understanding of the activities of other teams. Doing so can increase trust across teams and enable IT to more easily assess requirements and deliver suitable technology.
• Consider implementing or expanding full self-service. While self-service carries risk of unauthorized use, security issues, cost and complexity, expanding it also allows more freedom, particularly for developers, to improve the speed and regularity of application and platform development. That will be crucial as organizations increasingly use internally developed applications to drive revenue.
• Use requests for proposal (RFPs) for complex and highly impactful purchases. Using RFPs to identify and engage with vendors and service providers can help IT teams learn how to properly scope complex projects and requirements, standardize their purchasing approach, align with business goals and mitigate risks.

David Essex is an industry editor who covers enterprise applications, emerging technology and market trends, and creates in-depth content for several TechTarget websites.