Netsuite looks to de-silo users

It means this is the year Cloud stops being `cool’ and becomes an integral part of overall business management infrastructure and ecosystems. In practice, the survey shows that there is still some way to go before Cloud services meet their potential as the source of flexible, agile, dynamic integration between all aspects of any business. There is still a significant need to break down both the real and perceived siloes.

 

The survey was conducted on NetSuite’s behalf by Loudhouse, an independent agency based in London. A total of 300 respondents responsible for finance allocation (50%) and resource planning (50%) in the IT sector completed an online survey during November 2011. 100 respondents participated in each of the UK, US and Australia, with respondents divided between software development (58%) and IT services or consulting firms (42%). 

 

Over one third (35%) of organisations in the study report that Cloud SaaS is in use across the organisation. A further third (31%) report partial adoption. Cloud technologies are no longer new innovations; they are now maturing technologies that can be put to serious use to benefit the business as a whole. Full adoption of Cloud /SaaS was much more likely in the software development side of the industry than it was in the services side in 2011 (43% vs. 23%).

 

With 64% of respondents saying they expect Cloud to make up a larger part of their IT budgets in 2012, the pressure to solve some operational problems will increase, and in particular the disconnect that continues to exist between the perceptions of what is happening in a business and the reality.  

 

For example, the survey showed that 60% of companies surveyed reported full integration between finance and operations within their organisations, while 55% reported full integration between sales and non-sales functions during 2011. The reported level of integration for both types was highest in the UK.

 

Clearly, however, there are some inconsistencies in what is actually experienced in the business itself, as 65% of respondents in the survey felt that accounting systems are usually too disconnected from the business. There was also a noticeable disconnect between accounting and finance professionals in the levels of integration that they reported, with 70% of finance professionals reporting full integration between their department and the operations function, while only 49% of operations professionals reported full integration with Finance.

 

This suggests that a mix of perception and internal business culture issues are in play here. One is likely to be the traditional view of professionals of the `need to know’ for operations staff, is coming into play.  The possibilities opened up by the Cloud run counter to the traditional need to maintain the siloes that can often exist between `specialist management’ and `operations staff’. This is particularly the case with the newer Cloud applications such as CRM and ecommerce. The survey gave them the lowest integration ratings, in the mid-20% range.

 

This suggests there are issues with integrating front office systems with back office operations, which is quite likely due to the age of the underlying technology of back office systems and the difficulties this can bring to integration.

 

Because of the strong link between integration and profitability observed in 2011, the survey results suggest that many businesses not only need to take a much firmer hold on the levels of integration between elements of their operations, but also of the need to de-silo the cultures underpinning in the businesses.

 

Management-reporting maturity is also shown to be an area of weakness. Only 11% of respondents reported that they had real-time information and analytics access across the business, while 64% reported that their reporting was entirely or mostly manual. In many cases that often means data is held in spreadsheets that are often specific to individual teams, and therefore unavailable elsewhere.