By Steve Ranger, 8 February 2006 12:10
NEWS
Companies are leaving software to gather dust on the shelf for six months before they even take a look at it - and then waiting another six months to actually deploy it.
Such businesses are taking a "frivolous approach" to new software by not implementing it for a year after they buy it, according to a survey of 135 IT managers.
More than two thirds - 69 per cent - of those surveyed said they left new software untouched for six months or more and 85 per cent said they took a further six months to deploy these new applications.
But nearly a third of companies said they had to manually install new software applications, rising to 41 per cent of companies of up to 3000 employees, according to the survey sponsored by Enteo Software.
Software updates are an "exceptionally time consuming and mundane task", said Stephan Glathe, Enteo's managing director, which means they get pushed to the bottom of the to-do list.
"Waiting more than a year to roll out software is like paying now and buying later. IT is meant to underpin and drive business performance but the research would indicate that this isn't happening," he said in a statement.
Nearly three-quarters (71 per cent) of IT managers surveyed said they spent over half of their time on supporting end users and one in five admitted to spending three quarters of their time on this.
Comments
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1. Simon Allen
They vital question is:
What is the software that they are not installing?
1) Operating system updates
2) Routine Office and similar apps
3) Special apps for the client
The effects will be very different and so no conclusion can be drawn at this time.
It will be no surprise to anyone experienced in IT that the support costs (i.e. time) continues to escalate. The prevalence of computers in schools mnight have been expected to reduce problems as they have entered every day life. That has not happened and companies must look to find the root of the problem. Actually, I think there are two problems but that is another story!
2. Roger Huffadine
Hardly surprising - a lot of, supposed, network ready applications are written by morons. We spend hours preparing software for deployment on the network because of silly programming mistakes - for example- when we hide a folder that is used by an application (to add security to our network) the application says it can't see the folder contents - duuuh!
When programmers start to write easily deployable code and upgrades we will be able to keep on top of the problem - but for now, yes, it takes forever to build a deployable and tested version of most 'network ready' code.
3. Simon
I wonder how much of it comes into the "bought on the basis of stated system requirements, then find that the actual requirements are different" ?
I've been there, and with a lot of purchases it just isn't worth doing a test run with just one licence before buying the 3 or 4 llicences you actually need. Stupid things like software that will not work AT ALL on a network, or software that will not work AT ALL unless the user has administrative rights, software that won't work if there's a space in the path name(s), software that won't work with UNC and requires mapped drives, software that won't work unless you fudge the server to make all users equivalent so you can't apply any access controls and so can't roll out the software outside the payroll dept, and that old favourite "works with any web browser" but only as long as it's IE6 on Windows.
I've had all of these and more, so I'm not at all surprised by the findings.
Yes, as someone else has already pointed out, many vendors are completely clueless morons (that at least is the politest things I can say about them). What's worse than all these stupid design errors is the attitude when you ask the vendor to fix it - sometimes you'd get a more favourable response if you'd asked to do lurid acts with their daughters !