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76% of Public Sector Organisations Go Live with Applications Despite
Quality Problems
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Survey Finds 73% of Public Sector Bodies Waste Up to Half a Million Pounds on Poorly Performing Applications
London, 21st March, 2005 - Research commissioned by Compuware Corporation (NASDAQ: CPWR) has found that out of 100 public sector IT directors, 76% per cent of those surveyed go- live with applications when quality problems still exist. Not only are these directors deploying applications of poor quality, but 72% also admitted that they do not numerically quantify the risk of failure when going live with a new application. With such a high number of public sector organisations unable to quantify, and therefore mitigate risk, as well as gauge software quality, it is concerning that 73% of respondents stated that the cost of poor software quality to their public sector organisations was between £100,000 and £500,000 per year.
"Public sector bodies should be wary of going live with applications when they don't know what the risks are. Poor quality applications can have a serious impact on the success of e-government initiatives," comments Sarah Saltzman, Technology Support Manager, Compuware. "Rather than trying to negotiate the unknown, public sector IT departments should be measuring and monitoring risk throughout the development of an application, so that they can make go-live decisions based on the amount of risk they are prepared to take. Furthermore, public sector bodies should be ensuring that the most critical parts of an application have been rigorously tested to ensure a low risk of failure. This approach will significantly reduce the risk of these organisations suffering from the types of high profile IT failures that have been reported recently."
The survey also found that 69% of organisations take a blanket approach to testing applications, which is a time consuming and impractical task. This problem can be linked to the fact that more than half (51%) of those questioned said that when testing an application, senior management hardly gave any business guidance and most responsibility was left up to the IT department. This means that the IT department has no indication of what the critical elements of the application are and as such are unable to develop a testing strategy aimed at these. Taking a risk-based approach would enable public sector IT directors to accurately asses the risk of an application failing and the impact such failure would have on service delivery. This assessment can then be fed back to senior management, enabling them to assess whether or not an application should go live at a specified time and make an informed decision based on the data that the testing team has presented to them.
"Time pressures and budgets mean that testing the whole application is impractical. Therefore organisations need to focus on decreasing risk to an acceptable level, rather than striving for the impossible and failing," continues Saltzman. "What organisations need to do is prioritise their testing efforts by thoroughly testing the parts of the application which hold the biggest risk. Adopting this risk-based approach enables testing teams to identify the less critical parts of the application where defects will be more acceptable, rather than taking a blanket approach and saying that a certain amount of defects can be tolerated without knowing which part of the application, and more importantly what processes, they might affect."
The research was conducted by independent research company Vanson & Bourne, with 100 IT directors working in the public sector questioned.
About Compuware
Compuware Corporation (NASDAQ: CPWR) maximises the value IT brings to the business by helping CIOs more effectively manage the business of IT. Compuware solutions accelerate the development, improve the quality and enhance the performance of critical business systems while enabling CIOs to align and govern the entire IT portfolio, increasing efficiency, cost control and employee productivity throughout the IT organisation. Founded in 1973, Compuware serves the world's leading IT organisations, including more than 90 per cent of the Fortune 100 companies.
For more information visit: www.compuware.co.uk
Compuware is a registered trademark of Compuware Corporation. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Compuware is a member of The Prince's Trust Technology Leadership Group (TLG), a premier industry-networking forum for leaders within the IT industry, established in May 2002.
For Compuware Press Inquiries Contact:
Sophie Jarvis/ Barbara Bajkowski
Spark Communications
020 7357 8612
barbara@sparkcomms.co.uk
sophie@sparkcomms.co.uk
