Survey reveals executives are out of touch

Server Room vs. Board Room

Executives at organizations of all sizes and across countless industries experience many of the same challenges – from improving customer experience to staying ahead of the technology curve to cutting costs. One common challenge many executives face is avoiding the stigma of being seen as “out of touch” with what is going on from a day-to-day perspective in their organizations. Unfortunately for them, that’s exactly what a recent Evolve IP survey exposed.

The results of our recent “Evolve IP 2015 State of the Desktop” web-based survey revealed some interesting statistics, some of the most notable being the differences in product knowledge levels and perspectives of the executives and IT professionals surveyed. Our analysis detailed survey results from 1,031 IT professionals and executives about the latest practices, trends, technologies and challenges around the desktop.

We identified several areas where there is a significant disconnect between organizations’ IT staff and executives:

Desktop Technology Awareness
Executives are remarkably unaware of newer desktop technologies. Nearly four-in-10 (39 percent) were unaware oftheterm Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) compared to just 12 percent of IT professionals. Another 35.5 percent had not heard of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) compared to just 4.5 percent of IT pros. 

Plans to Implement Virtual Desktops
While 43 percent of IT professionals plan on implementing virtual desktops in the next three years, just 28 percent of executives noted their organization will be doing so. That number jumps to a 24 percentage point difference when looking out to five years, with 60 percent of IT pros compared to 36 percent of executives.

This disconnect is not terribly surprising, since – as illustrated above – IT professionals are more aware about virtual desktop technologies than their executive counterparts.

However, not being on the same page about implementing a new technology signifies a potential problematic communication issue.

Time & Money Spent on Desktop Issues
IT pros are spending more time dealing with desktop issues than executives believe. While executives believe that four-in-10 IT pros spend just 10 percent of their time on desktop issues, the reality is that two-in-10 do.

This difference clearly signifies that executives are not aware of just how much time their IT staff actually spends handling desktop issues.

There is also a noted lack of awareness as to how much is actually being spent on desktop hardware and software by the executives at organizations with more than 100 employees.

For example, just 10.5 percent of executives believe their company spends more than $200,000 on desktop hardware and software while 26.5 percent of IT pros report spending that amount or more.

These re­sults indicate that many executives are not aware of how much of their organizations’ IT spend is actually going toward desktop hardware and software. If executives were better informed about the amount spent annually on their associates’ desktops, they might move more readily toward a DaaS solution, which would reduce those costs.

Benefits of Virtual Desktops
Not all the differences in perception are negative, however. As expected, 64.5 percent of executives cited mobility as the number one benefit of virtual desktops, while 63.5 percent of IT pros noted that time savings and efficiency was the number one benefit. While this is also an area of disagreement, the good news is that it’s a good thing in this case because both the executive team and the IT staff will reap the benefits they cherish most from a virtual desktop solution.

To download the full survey report, along with an infographic and an interesting list of “mythbusters” about DaaS, click here.

About Evolve IP

Evolve IP is The Cloud Strategy Company™. Designed from the beginning to provide organizations with a unified option for cloud services, Evolve IP enables decision-makers to migrate all or select IT technologies to its award-winning cloud platform. Evolve IP’s combination of security, stability, scalability, and lower total cost of ownership is fundamentally superior to outdated legacy systems and other cloud offerings. Today, tens of thousands of customers across the globe depend daily on Evolve IP for cloud services like virtual servers, virtual desktops, disaster recovery, unified communications, contact centers, and more.