“On the surface, a badly organized, overloaded and out-dated applications landscape sounds like a minor irritation for the IT team, absorbing bandwidth and wasting money, but ultimately not a problem that should keep the wider business up at night,” comments Ron Tolido, CTO Application Services Continental Europe at Capgemini. “But in a world where all facets of an organization are starting to embrace digital transformation - and are dependent on the quick deployment of mobile, social, Big Data and Cloud solutions for competitive advantage – a well-rationalized applications landscape suddenly becomes a much bigger, strategic imperative for the whole company.” 

The study also contains evidence that, while Western organizations are creaking under the strain of outdated, un-used legacy applications, developing markets are benefiting from their relatively fresh, young IT landscape. Where countries like Finland and Norway report below average levels of understanding between business and IT (just 64 percent and 69 percent respectively believe the relationship is ‘satisfactory’), an encouraging 92 percent of respondents in Brazil, India and China report a satisfactory understanding between the two.

Ron Tolido continues: “There is definitely an argument to be made that high growth markets are at a significant advantage when it comes to ensuring the applications landscape lines up with the business’s goals and objectives. This may give them a head start in digital transformation initiatives and could represent an important competitive advantage over their Western business rivals.”

The findings of Capgemini’s 2014 Application Landscape Report are based on a survey conducted in 12 languages with 1,116 CIOs and top-level IT decision makers in companies of various sizes from a wide range of industries. With a global emphasis, the report covers 16 countries, with 73 percent of respondents from developed economies (Australia, Europe, USA) and a further 27 percent from fast developing countries (Brazil, China, India).

In addition, the findings of the report are also derived from the extensive work done by Capgemini’s Wide-angle Application Rationalization Program (WARP) CoE. WARP is Capgemini’s proven framework for application rationalization and IT transformation. The Centre of Excellence for WARP specializes in such engagements and over the past 4 years, has catered to over 150 clients and analyzed more than 30,000 applications, thus providing key industry benchmarks for critical IT metrics.

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