Operational silos the bane of cloud use in business: Oracle study

  • Poor cloud integration leading to operational inefficiencies and challenges around innovation
  • 54% experienced staff downtime in last six months due to cloud integration problems

OPERATIONAL silos are often preventing organisations from realising the promise of improved business performance, according to the findings of a research study Oracle Corp released recently.
 
Businesses have not yet adequately integrated their cloud applications across their business functions, and because of this, many have reported operational inefficiencies and challenges around innovation, Oracle said in a statement.
 
The independent market research report by Dynamic Markets, with the title ‘Cloud for Business Managers: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’ involved interviews with 1,355 senior decision makers from businesses globally with revenues of US$65 million or more.
 
Operational silos the bane of cloud use in business: Oracle studyRespondents were selected from a wide range of business functions including research and development, sales/ commerce/ e-commerce, marketing, customer relationship management, finance and human resources.
 
Businesses were surveyed in the following countries: Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Nordics, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the United States.
 
Organisations are looking to the cloud to change not only how they buy and consume IT, but also how cloud actually impacts the business. In fact, one of the main drivers for organisations deploying cloud applications is to improve operational agility and effectiveness, Oracle said.
 
“Cloud applications have the power to dramatically improve business performance while reducing costs, but only if they can work across the business,” said Rex Wang (pic), vice president of product marketing at Oracle.
 
 “Subscribing to a cloud service may be relatively straightforward, but how this application fits in with the rest of the enterprise, including on-premise systems and other cloud applications, must be thought through,” he added.
  
Among the key findings:

  • 54% of respondents say their department has experienced staff downtime in the last six months due to cloud integration problems.
  • 52% of businesses have suffered from missed deadlines and 75% have had their ability to innovate impaired by poor integration of their cloud applications, which has left applications isolated from the rest of their business functions.

Other findings

  1. Application siloes proving a challenge for innovation: The vast majority of businesses have been prevented from getting the best out of their departmental cloud applications due to the poor integration with other applications.
  1. Promise of cloud failing to materialise due to business process siloes: Businesses stated that their motivation behind deploying cloud applications was to get quick access to software, while only less than half of the respondents get access to more appropriate software for their department. This contrasts dramatically with the reality of their experience and highlights the importance of getting business processes and applications out of organisational siloes.
  1. Businesses aiming for better application integration: The majority of businesses have recognised the need to better integrate business functions and applications.

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