The first mention I saw about a growing gap between companies that 'get' IT and use it effectively and those that don't was in research published by Meta Group (now part of Gartner) in 2004. They predicted that there would be an increasing gap between internal IT organisations that were strategic in their orientation and those that were operational. They predicted that those that were operationally focused would find themselves outsourced, downsized and had they know then - replaced by cloud applications.
There is plenty of evidence that Meta Group were right. A study published late last year by Accenture titled "Mind The Gap: Insights from Accenture's Third Global IT Performance Study" covering 225 of the worlds largest companies concluded that the gap in performance of IT in high performing organisations was 42% in terms of innovation and 37% for execution. Accenture identified 9 areas that high performing IT organisations excelled at:
1. Strategic IT alignment
2. Effective IT Governance and clear strategic business cases for all IT investments
3. Clear application architecture
4. Focus on information management not technology
5. Implemented a standarised platform and service management approach such as ITIL
6. Effective solution delivery and highly visible project performance
7. Effective workforce management
8. Effective and proactive IT security strategy
9. Intelligent use of outsourcing to access hard to get skill sets and agility
The question as a CIO then, is what do you do if your IT organisation is not viewed as strategic? Is it possible to change thaose perceptions or is a change of employer required?
Also look out for my article in the current issue of CIO Magazine on the challenges for the CIO of the future (Sept-Oct p. 80-81).
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