Operational siloes hinder effectiveness of cloud applications

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Due to this, many have reported operational inefficiencies and challenges around innovation.

The independent market research report by Dynamic Markets details interviews with 1,355 senior decision makers from businesses globally. Respondents were selected from a wide range of business functions.

According to the report, over half of respondents (54 per cent) said their department had experienced staff downtime in the last six months due to cloud integration problems. In fact, departments not even using cloud apps have been affected by their colleagues that are.

Meanwhile, over half of businesses (52 per cent) have suffered from missed deadlines and three quarters of respondents (75 per cent) have had their ability to innovate impaired by poor integration of their cloud applications, which has left applications isolated from the rest of their business functions. This is despite the fact that for the majority of businesses one of the main drivers for deploying cloud applications is to improve operational agility and effectiveness.

The vast majority (83 per cent) of businesses have been prevented from getting the best out of their departmental cloud applications, with one in four blaming poor integration with other applications. Importantly, 75 per cent said their ability to innovate using cloud applications has also been hindered, with one in two citing a lack of integration. Being unable to integrate the cloud application with other software owned by the company was highlighted as a particular issue, followed by being unable to customise the cloud application to meet company specific needs.

Over three quarters of businesses stated that their motivation behind deploying cloud applications was to get quick access to software, while 47 per cent did it to get access to more appropriate software for their department. This contrasts dramatically with the reality of their experience and highlights the importance of getting business processes and applications out of organisational siloes.

“Cloud applications have the power to dramatically improve business performance while reducing costs, but only if they can work across the business. For example, sales managers need to have their territory planning and quota management tools integrated with the Human Resource and Compensation applications in order to better drive behavior and achieve sales goals. Subscribing to a cloud service may be relatively straightforward, but how this application fits in with the rest of the enterprise, including on-premise systems and other cloud applications must be thought through,” said Rex Wang, vice president of product marketing, Oracle. “Oracle’s Cloud portfolio has been built with this in mind, enabling us to provide integrated cloud solutions for the whole enterprise. This is a unique capability which means that our customers can source all of their cloud requirements from one place and deliver integrated processes across all their lines of business.”