A Huge 76% of UK IT Projects Overrun: Mulesoft

“CIOs are uniquely positioned to lead their organization’s digital transformation”

Over three quarters (76%) of UK organisations were unable to deliver their IT projects to schedule in 2019.

That’s according to a new survey from Mulesoft which also found that half of IT professionals are working under increasing resource pressure: while project workloads have grown by 40 percent, budgets are only set to increase 10 percent this year.

(While the survey doesn’t mention it, the UK’s particularly poor performance in this regard is highly likely to have been caused, in part, by the growing impact of tax changes that have seen many IT contractors down-tools ahead of a planned April 6 tax change.)

The current business model in most IT departments meanwhile is stifling innovation and development as workers spending nearly 70 percent of their time just keeping the business running, it suggests.

UK IT Projects: Delays a Warning Sign for Enterprise 

With broader digitalisation, growing demand for the use of Big Data to inform business strategy, and applications central to customer engagement, the findings represent a real warning for businesses.

Simon Parmett, CEO of MuleSoft said: “CIOs are uniquely positioned to lead their organisation’s digital transformation.

“IT leaders across all industries must be focused on creating a new operating model that accelerates the speed of delivery, increases organizational agility and delivers innovation at scale.”

The company specialises in API management and plugging large, diverse IT systems together.

Predictably, as a result, Parmett was keen to emphasise the role of APIs in fixing the hamster wheel approach to projects.

He said: “With an API-led approach, CIOs can change the clock speed of their business and emerge as the steward of a composable enterprise to democratize access to existing assets and new capabilities.”

API Strategies

APIs form an increasingly core part of how the entire IT sector operates, yet the survey shows more than half (54%) of APIs are being implemented on a project-by-project basis, without thinking of bigger picture integrations.

A key issues highlighted by Mulesoft’s study is that organisations don’t have an easy method to share APIs, as roughly only 40 percent of internal software assets and components are available for reuse by developers. To make it worse, 80 percent of organisations are reporting that they do not have an effective way to share APIs.

The firms that are designing APIs with a specific intent are experiencing a significant return on business outcomes such as increased productivity and greater innovation.

The report states that: “By establishing API strategies that promote self-service and reuse, businesses put themselves in a much better position to innovate at speed, increase productivity and open up new revenue streams.”