In March, we released the results of our third annual global IT decision maker research, which surveyed 500 tech leaders from Australia, France, Germany, UK and the US. We sought to understand how MACH investment has accelerated over the past 12 months and what impact that is having on organizations’ ability to thrive in a difficult economy.
We’re publishing a four part blog series to dive further into each of the four key research areas within the report, which are:
- Challenges to upgrading infrastructure
- Influences on transformation
- MACH utilization
- Evidence of MACH benefits
Part one of the series can be found here, MACH Global Research 2023 Blog Series Pt. 1: So Many Upgrades, So Little Time. Today, we’re looking at the next section: Influences on transformation.
Innovate or be left behind
Research respondents emphasized that the urgency to innovate is becoming more pressing over time. Organizations are facing external pressures which make clear the need for agile IT. More specifically, over 80% of those polled said they “strongly agree” or “tend to agree” that concerns about the economy have increased the need to adapt and modernize their IT infrastructure. Further, more than 85% said they agree organizations that don’t innovate now will be left behind.
That matters for MACH because these forces – think: economic pressure, increasing end-user expectations, lingering challenges from the Coronavirus pandemic – are likely to raise demand for tools and approaches that deliver a means to cope with these pressures. Eighty-five percent of organizations have increased the percentage of their MACH infrastructure in the past 12 months and they cite increased ability to respond to changes in the market faster, to build and implement new functionality quicker and reduced costs. They’re also more likely to say their infrastructure is keeping up with customer demands and that they’re ahead of the competition than those with lower MACH adoption rates.
A ranking of IT priorities
So what areas of focus did IT leaders say they would prioritize in order to innovate and stay ahead?
The top-five areas of consideration for front-office infrastructure improvements, as noted by respondents, are:
1. Cloud-native applications (52%)
2. Use automation to simplify and speed up workflows (50%)
3. Open APIs to allow interaction with third-party applications (47%)
4. Automation to minimize the amount of effort for a user (46%)
5. Simple and intuitive user interface and experience (46%)
The prioritization of these features suggests that companies are looking to integrate and speed-up their workflows. If implemented effectively, these traits can help them achieve the agility and responsiveness required to manage today’s challenging market conditions.
The importance of agility
Paving the way for success in a volatile business environment is best done by ensuring maneuverability in your enterprise technology stack. Companies can help alleviate some of the pressure from external forces by applying the principles of MACH. IT architecture based on MACH principles is designed to be adaptive and to enable quick response to changes in the environment. That’s because applications can be broken down into small, independent components that can be independently deployed and updated, making it easier to quickly adapt applications to changes in market conditions, requirements or technology.
For companies that have already made investments in flexible IT architecture, the ability to react is more within reach. For companies with a monolithic architecture, difficult market conditions present a good time to break old paradigms and alter the digital architecture. That time is now and the respondents to our research agree.
Stay tuned for the third part of this four part series, which will publish in two weeks and focus on MACH utilization including MACH adoption comparisons based on company size, key drivers behind it and perceptions around where MACH delivers greater impact – front- or back-end.