Time to combat the Cinderella treatment of IT?

The new Sysop training centre

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Heywood IT educator and consultant Sysop’s latest survey reveals a need to revisit and reinforce the importance of IT for business.

“ITIL and other education is designed to promote IT’s profile and professionalism, with a commercial goal to achieve the alignment of IT with business objectives” says Sysop managing director and lead consultant Stuart Sawle.

“There is a continuing need to champion the benefits of IT for business, to correct any drift into Cinderella territory.”

Fewer than three in ten, just 27%, of respondents to the latest Sysop survey say their organisation views IT as ‘a strategic asset’, while 39% say that, according to their own customers, their IT services support their business processes ‘poorly’ (3%), or indicate that there is ‘room for improvement’ (36%).

There is recognition that IT has a functional role to play in the organisation, with 67% of respondents agreeing that it is ‘a business support function’, and 38% saying it does this ‘very well’.

However, a majority of respondents (55%) describe their IT’s support for ‘key business processes’ as merely ‘adequate’.

One third of users are ‘disinterested’ in their IT (18%) or ‘negative’ towards it (15%).Sysop’s survey findings also reveal resistance to investment in IT, with 55% of respondents saying that it is ‘quite difficult’ (39%) or ‘very difficult’ (15%) to gain IT budget authorisation, and although IT is not alone in experiencing budget resistance, it “highlights the importance of promoting the business case”, say Sysop.

Data security is still a ‘cause for some concern’ among one in five of the organisations surveyed (19%), though more than half (53%) rate it ‘fit for purpose’ and 28% say it is ‘better than required’.

Of the technology trends that Sysop’s survey measured, business intelligence (BI) is clearly an established feature of the IT landscape, with almost seven in ten of those surveyed now using BI tools in their business; while cloud computing (at an earlier stage of adoption) is being used by respondent companies ‘to some extent’ (40%) or ‘quite extensively’ (21%).