Business Name commissioned an HDI report, which focuses on three verticals: education, government, and healthcare. While each of these faces its own challenges, they are linked by three common threads:
• Strong and specific compliance requirements
• Financial constraints over which they have limited control
• Mandates to modernize IT in response to the needs of their customers and users
IT departments in these sectors often find themselves caught between the need to modernize and the need to operate within budget constraints. These constraints are exacerbated in government and education by the cyclical nature of their funding. Legislative bodies hold the purse strings, and their budget cycles often run across multiple years.
In higher education, for example, “fully two-thirds (68%) of [institutions] report that campus IT funding has not recovered from the recurring budget cuts that began for most institutions with the ‘Great Recession’ in fall 2008.” As a side effect of these budget constraints, 79% of organizations reported that their campuses had “a difficult time retaining IT talent because salaries and benefits are not competitive with off-campus job opportunities.” This leads to further resource constraints.
Meanwhile, rapid change is taking place in technology, and all three verticals are operating under pressure to provide up-to-date services for their constituencies. These competing priorities—budget constraints versus the provision of services—require that IT departments operate extremely efficiently and very effectively. These requirements point to the need for mature IT Service Management (ITSM) practices and processes, as well as the need for ITSM tools and technologies that enable efficient operations and support.
Drawing on HDI research conducted over the past year, this report considers the opportunities and challenges that pertain to these sectors, looking at how the results illustrate the maturity (or immaturity) in how IT technology and services are being used and executed.
You can get a copy of the full report here.
