Organizations are constantly bringing new software into their tech stack, but IT leaders are finding it difficult to gain visibility into adoption and usage of company issued applications, with just 5% saying they have complete visibility into the total number of employees that adopt and use company-approved applications.
The data comes from a study conducted by digital employee experience management firm Nexthink, which dives into issues such as shadow IT and poor user adoption of corporate IT tools. The Boston-based firm’s report, “IT’s Big, Expensive, Software Problems,” found that IT executives are growing concerned with their total software spend and shadow IT as employees are using up to 50 applications every day.
The report, sourced by Gartner Peer Insights, polled 200 IT executives in North America and EMEA and found that IT executives say they aren’t exactly sure how many of those applications were in active use and how many licenses were available. This data suggests that 95% of IT leaders are in the dark about the usage of their corporate-issued tools.
Third-party SaaS apps and custom web apps account for the vast majority of IT troubleshooting, with 75% responding affirmatively to a prompt about those apps accounting for the majority of employee IT troubleshooting.
Desktop and web applications are also taking too long to be resolved, with 70% of IT executives reporting that it takes their teams between six and 24 hours to fully resolve a single employee issue.
Now, 85% of IT executives say they are looking for software license savings and are considering cutting or optimizing license spending, but they’re concerned about impacts on employee productivity.
Nexthink’s research also looks at the effects of mergers and acquisitions on IT departments, with just 6% of IT leaders saying they feel highly confident that they can balance consolidating employee hardware and application licenses with improving productivity.
Yassine Zaied, chief strategy and marketing officer at Nexthink, says organizations can find savings on unused licenses. For example, if an application is $100 per license for 10,000 licenses and 500 employees aren’t using the application, that could result in nearly 41 million in savings.
“Software licenses can easily eat large portions of a budget unnecessarily, which is why IT needs the visibility to see this and take appropriate action,” Zaied says.
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