Twenty eight percent wasted on unwanted upgrades

Enterprise-sized businesses spend, on average, twenty eight percent of their software budgets on unwanted upgrades, migrations, and licensing changes, according to a survey of two thousand eighteen chief information officers and senior IT decision-makers.

IT leaders believe upgrades will harm performance

Ninety five percent of respondents said their organization paid for a vendor-driven upgrade, migration, or licensing change in the past three years that it believed would reduce performance, reliability, or business value.

CIOs have little leverage to refuse

Seventy six percent of respondents say their organization has very little real leverage in negotiations, and eighty percent say moving away from major vendors would cause significant disruption.

Upgrades drain funding from innovation and security

The result is less funding for innovation, named by thirty six percent of respondents, human resources at thirty two percent, security at thirty one percent, and customer-facing investment at thirty one percent.

Upgrades occupy technical staff for months

Liberty Mutual's CIO James McGlennon said an upgrade cycle could occupy top technical workers for the better part of a year, a recurring drag on capacity that prevents them working on initiatives that differentiate the…

“That's not a one-off cost, it's a recurring drag on capacity, and every year it repeats is a year those people aren't working on the initiatives that actually differentiate the business.”

CIOs should negotiate exit terms upfront

Marshall Van Alstyne, co-author and information sciences professor at Boston University, said CIOs should negotiate the exit before the entry, settling terms of a potential exit including migration assistance pricing and caps on renewal and…