Nexthink, a leader in Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management, has revealed a new study, IT’s Big, Expensive, Software Experience Problems which reveals the startling lack of understanding IT has around employee adoption and usage of applications. A proportion (22%) of IT executives surveyed claimed that ‘total software spend’ was their most pressing issue alongside 13% who reported ‘Shadow IT’ (employee use of unapproved apps and services). Despite these top priorities, IT decision-makers are roughly aware employees use between 11-50 applications every day but were unsure how many of those were in active use and how many seats (licenses) were available. Only 5% of respondents reported having complete visibility into the total number of employees that adopt and use company-approved applications. Leaving roughly 95% of IT leaders in the dark wondering whether their employees use the tools they’ve been provisioned.
“Set aside the security concern for Shadow IT – this creates a lot of spending waste on unused licenses,” said Yassine Zaied, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Nexthink. “At a price of US$100 per application license for 10,000 licenses, if 500 employees aren’t using their license seats, that’s almost a million dollars each year that could be taken back and reallocated. Software licenses can easily eat large portions of an IT budget unnecessarily, which is why IT needs the visibility to see this and take appropriate action.”
This report was sourced by Gartner Peer Insights, which surveyed 200 IT executives in North America and EMEA to understand the software landscape at their organisations, which issues they face and how leaders can better manage overspending in a tight economy.
Additional key findings from the report:
- Third-party SaaS and custom web apps account for the vast majority of IT troubleshooting – when asked ‘how accurate is the following statement: third-party SaaS or custom web application issues account for the majority of our employee IT troubleshooting’. A large number (75%) reported somewhat accurate or very accurate.
- To quantify how long it takes them to resolve those incidents (desktop vs. web applications) – 70% reported it takes their teams between six to 24 hours to fully resolve a single employee issue, whether it’s a desktop or web application problem.
- 85% strongly agree or agree that IT leaders want to cut/optimise software license spending but are concerned about impacts on employee productivity.
- When it comes to mergers and acquisitions, only 6% of IT leaders feel highly confident that they can balance consolidating employee hardware and application licenses with improving productivity.