Boardroom Britain lukewarm on value of IT

IT departments across the UK are still being held back by poor support at board level. Only 55% of IT directors believe the board recognises IT’s ability to confer competitive advantage. The actual picture could be far worse. Yet 70% of IT directors think IT a greater contributor to business benefit than new products or marketing. This is among key findings of research by Vanson Bourne among 100 IT directors in companies turning over at least £100 million across commerce and industry for Sun Microsystems. Clearly, there’s delusion on both sides, but it also reveals that IT infrastructures and their management, are not only far from ideal, but plagued by integration, interoperability and scalability problems as well as manpower and resource issues. “The main problem we’ve identified is that the IT directors perception of the role of technology is very different to that of the board,” says Mark Lewis, marketing manager, Infrastructure Solutions at Sun. “The board seems to view IT as little more than a cost centre. Until we alter this misconception, what chance is there for IT departments to demonstrate real business value?” That finding, while hardly new, is disappointing and, most important, worrying – in that if nothing changes it is bound to perpetuate the view, and ensure that lack of resource and budget allocation will turn scepticism of IT into a self-fulfilling prophesy. We need to tread a little carefully here. Sun clearly has a vested interest in pointing out infrastructure inadequacies – that’s what it sells, both in terms of hardware and services. But this is independent research, albeit with relatively small numbers, and Vanson Bourne is unequivocal. There is little doubt that while the technologies themselves are fine (and indeed the research confirms that), current IT infrastructures are impeding IT’s potential to contribute to businesses’ profitability and competitiveness. Around 40% of IT directors recognise that failure to integrate and scale (up and down), as well as the legacy of complexity and management costs are blocking IT’s attempts to deliver. But boards are restricting IT departments. Fewer than 20% of IT directors say that their resource make delivering IT projects on time and budget straightforward. Just as bad, 51% of IT directors are buying IT just to keep existing technology going: the sticking plaster mentality. Clearly, complexity, redundancy and unproductive cost are conspiring to hold back what is ultimately essential development. IT departments cannot add value if they are struggling just to stay on top. In fact, completing key IT projects on time and budget is judged impossible in 12% of businesses, while 70% say they manage only committing significant extra expense, diverting resources and jeopardising other projects. Only 18% have no problem. Beyond this, half of IT directors say integration projects are delayed or fail due to lack of interoperability – and that’s hardly surprising: 28% of businesses have more than 20 key IT suppliers, and 16% have 60! Not only does that hamper integration, it consumes training budget and time. At a detailed level, the most commonly cited barriers are inability to integrate as fully as desired (46%), followed by ‘inability to scale systems quickly and cheaply’ (43%). Multiple proprietary operating systems are third at 36%. Two thirds (62%) of respondents recognised that reducing the number of different types of hardware and software they have would reduce complexity. Two thirds (63%) also calculate that more than a quarter of their IT manpower is permanently deployed in non-productive ‘fix and maintain’ roles. “Years of building new systems onto old, fuelled by the pressure to exploit new technology, quickly and cost effectively, makes it likely that IT infrastructures are creaking under the strain,” observes Lewis. Sun’s answer, he says, will be to focus on selling ‘solutions’ rather than products – with the objective of appealing to IT directors that want to start on the road to reducing their complexity and consequent management costs and restrictions. Lewis concedes that in itself is far from easy, but he insists that recognising it and starting to look at ways of tackling it is capable of starting a turnaround.