Contemporary Problems of Social Work Современные проблемы социальной работы academic journal

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CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL WORK
There is a significant part of respondents that still see a decrease of their IT investments; 
however, the majority will slightly improve their budgets but to a modest extent, less than 10%, 
showing that the uncertain economic prospects are a major challenge with strong pressure 
on costs, including IT. Price pressure on traditional IT segments will continue. Investments 
will also target hot topics like big data, analytics, cloud computing, mobility and security. The 
importance of information technology for companies is shown on figure 7.
46%
25%
17%
16%
14%
29%
31%
23%
30%
38%
10%
20%
25%
29%
31%
9%
19%
25%
16%
13%
6%
5%
10%
9%
4%
Information or cyber
security
Analytics (big data &
business intelligence)
Cloud computing
Internet of things/
machine to machine
Digital workplace
Very important
Important
Partly important
Less important
Not important
Figure 7.
 Importance of Information Technology Hot Topics for Companies
It is not surprising that IT and cyber security are on top of the IT agenda either as a very 
important or important topics for companies of all sizes, as a sign that all levels are affected 
by an increased exposure to online environments and associated risks [21]. Moreover, the 
companies are already aware of them and invest according to their budgets, the size of the 
operations and technological risks. Analytics grew in importance on the IT agenda compared to 
the previous year as the companies see a more ardent need of having more accurate and faster 
data analysis, which impacts their business decisions. Moreover, the volume of unstructured 
data is becoming overwhelming, especially coming from online and mobile environments and 
needs to be structured and transformed into business solutions.
Cloud computing is still an important topic for many companies but they have already 
started investing in such models in the last few years and it is not a fresh topic anymore. The 
high interest in further investing in finance & accounting is remarkable, as it shows that all 
sizes companies still have space to modernize their financial management and it is the basis for 
creating a more sophisticated business analysis and models in the future, on top of that.
As the market conditions are rapidly changing and there are higher economic risks on the 
current local and global markets, almost a third of the companies will invest in more industry-
specific applications. Their business models need to better adapt to the specificity of their 
market segment. The growing competition among the peers forces the companies to align with 
the industry standards and to be more proactive in order to win over [19].
Following the increasing maturity of the Russian IT market and being constantly pressed to 
reduce their IT costs, the local companies have started to look more into externalization their 
business applications, respectively applications management, which is encouraging for the IT 
consulting companies. If the infrastructure outsourcing is becoming a more common practice, 
the application management side has been significantly underdeveloped in Russia compared 
to the rest of Europe. The overall outsourcing services, both infrastructure and application-
related ones, will see higher interest in the next years. It is a natural step towards maturity of 

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VOLUME 2, No. 1, 2016
IT demand and it is even more stressed by the focus on lowering the IT maintenance costs while 
increasing the performance.
During the survey hot topics in system integration industry were constantly shown that is why 
it is necessary to understand the demand on such knowledge and experience in implementing 
from business side. Big data plans have no longer remained in the discussion phase in Russia, 
as a large share – almost 90% – of the respondents have either realized related projects or are 
currently in the process of developing them in their companies, no matter the size [5]. Banking 
and telecom companies are early adopters of high capacity analytics in Russia, but the success 
of SAP HANA in other industries like manufacturing, retail and utilities is worthy of note.
Finance & accounting remains the lead in realized or in ongoing big data projects [14] the 
focus of the enterprises being to have better financial management, as well as planning and 
forecasting while analyzing a large amount of data from multiple channels, like online and 
mobile. HR departments have been targeted when implementing big data analytics, which is 
usually not on top of the list in other countries, but in the Russian companies, the shortage 
of skilled professionals has been a concern for many years. In this case [7; 9], big data tools 
can help the HR departments better understand the employees’ profile, their performance and 
motivation and to offer better packages to maintain highly professional staff and also to replace 
the employees whose performance is weak.
Another hot topic is cloud computing.
  There is still huge uncertainty regarding cloud 
computing, particularly related to security, availability, compliances and dependence on one 
vendor. Fear of vendor lock-in is a serious concern that keeps Russian companies away from 
cloud-based business applications [10]. This needs to be addressed by cloud vendors, as they 
have to offer easy migration tools and data transfer options, in order to address this issue and 
to support the further development of the cloud-based business applications.
Digital transformation is not so well represented in Russian market comparing to Europe or the 
United States, but it is definitely one of the drivers.
 The largest part of the Russian respondents 
prefer to have selected business areas to apply digital transformation and this is not surprising 
at all, as they are at the first stage of digital transformation, related to front-end transformation, 
which is mainly dedicated to improving customer experience with a limited impact on the 
back-end systems. The organizations that already have in place a digital strategy for the whole 
company are in general large companies, with over 2000 employees and they have at least a 
medium-term view on each step towards full digitalization. The smaller companies, with less 
than 500 employees, are the slowest when it comes to moving towards digital transformation. 
The insights into customer’s needs and behavior continue to be among the major factors in 
favor of digital transformation for the end users, through systems like digital marketing and 
digital customer services. They have a strong drive to improve customer interaction and sales, 
to open new channels to reach out to customers. The strong rise of the e-commerce practice 
makes a key focus out of the digital transformation within the organizations, especially the 
ones from services-oriented industries. The fact that understanding customer behavior, as 
along with the improvement of the digital customer experience are strong objectives in digital 
projects indicates that the companies increasingly place the customer at the heart of their 
business processes. Moreover, reaching out to the young generation and understanding it are 
more probably more effectively realized through digital channels.
For most of the Russian respondents, from small to large companies, their current application 
environment corresponds to their business needs. In the last several years the local organizations 
have been investing significantly in modernizing their application landscape. The medium-
sized companies, however, have stated that they wanted to see the most challenges when 
considering their applications system, as they have invested in deployments over the years, 
but a real application consolidation is needed. Even though there are not big challenges for 
business application support, all the Russian organizations are planning to modernize their 

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