Despite a steady stream of media reports to the contrary, ICT remains a predominately in-house affair, according to Ovum’s recent survey of the nation’s leading Chief Information Officers.

In a recent report, Ovum’s Dr Steve Hodgkinson said that the survey of the 63 CUIs who attended the recent SE-Corp CIO Strategy Summit in Melbourne provided a mixed review of the uptake of cloud services and IT sourcing.

“We asked CIOs about how they sourced a range of ICT activities and were surprised to find that three-quarters of the activities were currently provided by an in-house ICT department,” Dr Hodgkinson said.

Dr Hodgkinson said that the report paints a mixed picture of cloud computing uptake, and revealed a ‘prosaic focus’ on traditional in-house IT operations.

It is always difficult to assess the true rate of cloud services adoption – and to sift fact from fantasy,” Dr Hodgkinson said.

Ovum’s report found that 74 per cent of ICT work is primarily provided through an in-house department, with the figure projected to decline to 61 per cent during the coming two years.

Outsourced arrangements, which currently account for 13 per cent of ICT activity, is set to rise to 20 per cent over the coming two years.

Surprisingly, the report also found that cloud computing only accounts for four per cent of activity, but is projected to increase to about 15 per cent over the same time frame.

“The reality for this group of CIOs is that ICT management is still about managing the people, processes, and technologies of the in-house ICT department. It is therefore not surprising that a shortage of people and skills was regarded by CIOs as one of their major challenges,” Dr Hodgkinson concluded.