IT Trends 2016

Executive Visibility - Topping the list of IT Trends 2016 is helping CIOs take advantage of Big Data for themselves, while cutting through the clutter. Accelerating the time from data to decision requires analytics that highlight areas of risk and opportunity in support of business decisions, not technical ones. Proactive, predictive insight arms CIOs with the ability to ask the right questions, to challenge the status quo and surface technical risks that jeopardize revenue, reputation or brand. Real-time solutions that improve the signal-to-noise ratio top the CIO’s wish list for 2016.

Shift to Output- and Outcome-Based Outsourcing – Output- and outcome-based contracts focus on how delivered software adds value to the business, which is much different than the traditional contracts view that focuses on the resources needed to deliver the software. Mark Livingston, Executive Vice President at Cognizant, emphasizes that IT has long looked for a result-based approach and that software analytics provides the capability needed to baseline existing performance and objectively monitor contract performance overtime. Mr. Livingston expects aggressive shifting to output- and outcome-based agreements in 2016 because it is an opportunity to finally move beyond hour-based contracts to more effective value-centric models.

Prove Agile Transformation Value - While long touted as the answer to responsive, fast and customer-centric development, organizations are struggling to justify the investment to transform to Agile Development. Organizations that have spent numerous years and resources to adopt Agile are taking a step back to understand if the investment has delivered – and at the end of the day, many simply don’t know.Partners from Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) Agile Transformation practice indicate that clients now want to establish a baseline view of development team performance and to monitor improvements during the transformation. “Agile is great when the ten smartest developers in your company are doing it, but scaling it to the rest of the organization is challenging,” said a member of BCG’s Agile Transformation practice. “There are issues about productivity and quality, and so analytics gives us a way to measure this.”
Agile is not globally applicable. Software analytics offers a way to keep pace with Agile development cycles while creating a view into the quality, maintainability and technical risk of the work delivered. This is the type of insight and solution that is needed to responsibly move forward with Agile Transformation.

Govern Digital Transformations – While Digital Transformation is not a new concept, today’s challenges are around improving transformation governance. The need to mitigate risk at a software and infrastructure level only increases as organizations transform, embrace the Internet of things or as more data and complexity is produced.Broadridge Financial Solutions explains that, “Without software analytics you are blind. Software analytics creates transparency and proof especially for the C-suite. It not only provides an effective means to measure risk, but it helps determine whether risk is going up or down and supports better decision making.”
Mile-Wide and Mile-Deep Analytics - Traditionally, the project side of the house has owned portfolio analysis but the industry is moving past Application Portfolio Management to Application Portfolio Analysis. Rapid, technical analysis of large portfolios creates visibility and accelerates risk mitigation action. Whether organizations take deep dives into application assessments, change process or dedicated additional resources, Application Portfolio Analysis is moving from the PMO to the CIO.One financial services organization uses Application Portfolio Analysis across a large, diverse portfolio to identify those with disproportionate “Run the Business” cost. Once outliers have been identified, it uses application assessments to isolate high risk and complexity. This combined approach of mile-wide and mile-deep analytics has improved overall performance and driven down “Run the Business” cost.

Filed in: Industry News IT Leadership Risk & Security

Â This report describes the effects of different industrial factors on structural quality. Structural quality differed across technologies with COBOL applications generally having the lowest densities of critical weaknesses, while JAVA-EE had the highest densities. While structural quality differed slightly across industry segments, there was almost no effect from whether the application was in- or outsourced, or whether it was produced on- or off-shore. Large variations in the densities in critical weaknesses across applications suggested the major factors in structural quality are more related to conditions specific to each application. CRASH Report 2020: CAST Research on the Structural Condition of Critical Applications Report

Open source is part of almost every software capability we use today. At the very least libraries, frameworks or databases that get used in mission critical IT systems. In some cases entire systems being build on top of open source foundations. Since we have been benchmarking IT software for years, we thought we would set our sights on some of the most commonly used open source software (OSS) projects. Software Intelligence Report <> Papers

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Pete Pizzutillo Vice President

Pete Pizzutillo is Vice President at CAST and has spent the last 15 years working in the software industry. He passionately believes Software Intelligence is the cornerstone to successful digital transformation, and he actively helps customers realize the benefits of CAST's software analytics to ensure their IT systems are secure, resilient and efficient to support the next wave of modern business.