Economist Intelligence Unit uncovered the scale
of technical debt in financial services in a report sponsored by
Appian
LONDON, March 31, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Appian (NASDAQ:
APPN) today reveals that global leaders in financial services and
insurance (FSI) believe that legacy IT infrastructure and
applications are holding back their business transformation
aspirations and automation objectives. These are the findings of a
new report, "Financiers ridden with technical debt," from The
Economist Intelligence Unit (The EIU), supported by Appian. The
report's findings are rooted in a survey conducted by The EIU of
more than 1,000 IT decision-makers (ITDMs) and senior business
executives at financial services, banking, and insurance
corporations around the globe.
Economist Intelligence Unit uncovered the
scale of technical debt in financial services in a report sponsored
by Appian.
The need for business agility, spurred by recent global events,
is causing FSI) organizations to reimagine how they do business as
they work at an accelerated pace to adapt to change. Notably, close
to three-quarters (71%) of ITDMs in FSI organizations report that
the growth of technology project requests exceeds IT budget growth,
which is higher than the global average of 64%. Other key findings
include:
- 87% of respondents say their organization has encountered
operational difficulties in addressing the challenges posed by the
pandemic.
- 81% of FSI leaders say their organization needs to improve its
IT infrastructure and applications to better adapt to external
change.
- 44% of ITDMs believe inadequate collaboration between the IT
function and business units is a chief barrier to digitization,
compared to 27% of business decision-makers.
According to survey findings, automation is viewed as being one
of the most important technologies over the next 12 months by 31%
of global financial services executives. The report highlights that
more than a third (34%) of ITDMs believe that the reduction or
elimination of legacy IT would most help their organization achieve
its automation objectives. However, only 17% of financial services
business decision-makers believe that overcoming legacy IT would be
a key factor in helping their firms to embrace automation.
Aegon, one of the world's leading providers of life insurance,
pensions and asset management, has been able to accelerate their
delivery of IT applications by embracing digital automation and
innovation.
"Automation initiatives are not easy and, with lots of teams
launching projects in different groups, we risk making the same
mistakes repeatedly. Building a central automation advisory group
allowed our project teams to be independent and agile, but also
benefit from experience and hard-won expertise," said Boris Buis, Intelligent Automation and BPM Lead
at Aegon.
In 2018, Aegon introduced governance, security and provisioning
across the organization within the DevOps space with 20
applications and 10 teams working with Appian. Today, Aegon's
Intelligent Automation Team has 8 total full time employees with 2
dedicated to Appian and enables more than 16 federated DevOps teams
within the business to support over 50 applications.
"Financial services and insurance companies must bolster
collaboration between IT teams and the business units they serve.
Both groups recognize the need to collaborate more to meet their
digital and automation ambitions with speed, quality, and security.
Our report shows that by working together, modernizing dated legacy
systems, and adopting agile methodologies, organizations can
overcome barriers to digitization," said Michael Heffner, VP of Solutions and Industry
Go-to-Market at Appian.
Download the full Economist Intelligence Unit report, sponsored
by Appian, to read about the research and findings.
About the Report
"Financiers ridden with technical debt" reveals findings from a
- survey-based report written by The Economist Intelligence Unit
and supported by Appian, conducted between May and June 2021. The 1,002 survey respondents represent
IT and business decision-makers across six sectors (financial
services, insurance, healthcare, the public sector, oil and gas,
and energy and utilities) and nine countries (the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the
Netherlands, Spain, the UK
and Australia). One-third are
C-level executives, the remainder work at director level or above.
Half of the respondents work in organizations with annual revenues
of over US$1bn. The report
supplements survey findings with secondary research and in-depth
interviews with financial services and insurance experts.
About Appian
Appian is the unified platform for change. We accelerate
customers' businesses by discovering, designing, and automating
their most important processes. The Appian Low-Code Platform
combines the key capabilities needed to get work done faster,
Process Mining + Workflow + Automation, in a unified low-code
platform. Appian is open, enterprise-grade and trusted by industry
leaders. For more information, visit appian.com.
Follow Appian: Twitter, LinkedIn.
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SOURCE Appian