Latest Reports

• Enterprise Architecture Tops List of Most Mature Best Practices

  Avasant has released its major annual study on 35 IT management best practices, with enterprise architecture topping our list of most mature practices. This Research Byte highlights some of our findings on the most mature practices, along with an overview of the contents of the full study. The full study analyzes the growth and maturity of all 35 best practices, which are grouped into five major categories: IT governance, IT financial management, IT operational management, IT security and risk management, and application development.

  March, 2023

• The Questions to Ask About Telecommuting Before Someone Else Does

  Whether allowing work from home is a good idea depends on the organization, the role, how centralized your business is, the strength of your management team, and many other variables. But if you are going to allow more telecommuting, you need certain ducks in a row. 

  March, 2023

• Orange Cyberdefense Reports Changing Trends in Cyber Extortion and Ransomware

  Ransomware and cyber extortion are not only becoming more common but more damaging to enterprises. As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, often supported by nation-states, they are leading to high-profile and embarrassing releases of customer data. Orange Cyberdefense, which held an analyst event in Antwerp, Belgium, followed a few days later by a customer and partner event in London, England at the end of November 2022, is countering these threats by providing new managed security services offerings, including increased threat intelligence, and supporting secure access service edge (SASE).

  March, 2023

• Strategies for Enterprises in Response to Tech Industry Layoffs

  The recent spate of layoffs in the technology industry should raise questions in the mind of customers who have these vendors as essential elements of their IT landscape. These concerns also extend to service providers, who are also seeing a pullback in business and undergoing staff reductions. This Research Byte explores these issues and how business leaders should mitigate risks and take advantage of opportunities during such uncertain times.

  March, 2023

• IT Spending Rising Despite Recession Fears

  Despite most of our survey respondents agreeing that the economy will be worse in 2023 than in 2022, they also report IT spending increases that are broad and strong. How can this be? It is because business leaders no longer see IT as a cost center but as a strategic driver of growth. As a result, they are giving their IT departments greater resources to help plan for a possible coming recession rather than asking them to tighten their belts. This Research Byte summarizes the full study.

  February, 2023

• Best Practices in Adopting a Shared Services Model

  In their endeavors to become high performing organizations, businesses are pushing all innovation frontiers to do more with less and achieve excellence even in these times of curtailed budgets. Shared services is one such definitive innovative model that many organizations have adopted to beat the ever growing challenges of seamless service delivery, consolidation of distributed accountabilities, progressive efficiency improvements, and fiscal pressures.

  August, 2013

• E-commerce Staffing Flat Despite Growth of Omnichannel

  Social media, mobile devices, multimedia, and even the prospects of the metaverse, are increasing the ways customers and suppliers interact. The omnichannel experience will pressure organizations to build larger web and e-commerce footprints. With that increasing pressure, we expect web/e-commerce staffing to also increase. This Research Byte summarizes the five-year trend in web/e-commerce staffing ratios.

  February, 2023

• Digital Commerce: Enabling Personalization at Scale

  Digital commerce remains attractive to consumers due in a large part to the growth of digital channels and improvements in payment and service delivery. Enterprises would like to expand that success to B2B. For both B2C and B2B customers, personalization has become a major differentiator, and service providers are helping enterprises deploy integrated digital commerce solutions. This resulted in an increase of 31% in service providers’ revenue for digital commerce services in 2021–2022. These emerging trends are covered in Avasant’s Digital Commerce Services 2022–2023 RadarView™.

  February, 2023

• Acumatica Gains from Citizen Developers but Challenges Remain

  ERP vendors are increasingly allowing their customers to create applications or make changes to a wide variety of applications and workflows with just a few steps. These low-code/no-code platforms allow regular ERP users to become power users. This citizen-development trend is a big factor in the growth of Acumatica, the Seattle-based cloud ERP vendor.

  February, 2023

• New Home for Business Analysts

  The business analyst staffing ratio appears to be declining, but the role is not falling in importance. Therefore, as business users become more IT-savvy, it is only natural that business analysts would increasingly be rising up within the business rather than in the IT organization. This Research Byte summarizes our full report on business analyst staffing ratios.

  February, 2023

• GCC Region Digital Services: Creating a Sustainable, Technology-Enabled Economy

  A substantive transformation program driven by digital-age technologies is underway in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. This program of change is founded on three overarching goals: diversifying from an oil-based economy, delivering best-in-class citizen services, and becoming a global technology hub. In response to GCC ambitions, service providers are enhancing their regional leadership, developing their local talent pools in AI, ML, and cybersecurity, and establishing regional partnerships. These emerging trends are covered in Avasant’s GCC Region Digital Services 2022–2023 RadarView™.

  February, 2023

• Leveraging Technology to Overcome Challenges in the CPG Sector

  CPG manufacturers have recently enjoyed boom times resulting from the increase in consumer spending since the start of the pandemic. However, they now anticipate shrinking profit margins due to higher inflation and supply chain disruptions. In response, they are investing in digital technologies to meet these challenges, collaborating with service providers for digital transformation to take advantage of their strong domain and technical experience. These emerging trends are covered in Avasant’s CPG Digital Services 2022–2023 RadarView™.

  February, 2023