CEO Poll > 68% feel IT is an inhibitor to business growth

A recent CIO Insight article a survey of over 150 CEOs showed that most of them believe that IT is an inhibitor to the overall growth of the company. Maybe not surprising to those in the Senior management positions within a company, but it should be a wake up call to those who believe that sooner or later their business partners will recognize the inherent business value that technology can bring to the table.

The problem that all IT leaders face right now is the cynicism and basic mistrust of any initiatives that IT proposes that does not show (in a traditional business sense) how it can cut the overall IT budget. CEOs and their teams are looking for IT leaders to cut costs. They fully believe and expect that their business towers can supply the resources and assets to utilize commercial off the shelf (COTS) products to sufficiently tap into the technology to help grow the business.

It's easy for someone in IT to look at that strategy as foolishness at the highest level since they have worked with those business folks expected to utilize the technology and know first hand that they have neither the background nor the understanding to leverage the proper tools in the vast COTS world. What's more is that they can only do what any other company can do with those tools. Without allowing an IT strategist to become involved and customize the solution by using not only his or her technological savvy but also their business acumen they are basically throwing in the proverbial IT white flag and considering that side of the business nothing more than overhead.

There are signs all over the the industry that this is exactly what is happening. IT is more often than not placed under the CFO. All initiatives go through the CFO and not the CEO. The CIO makes makes his or her case to the person responsible for the bottom line, usually someone with little IT background, except for perhaps the experience of how much it cost them to fix that ugly Y2K bug. Yes, they have been let down before and we in IT are all paying a heavy price for it.

Our CIOs have not been doing a good job of promoting the innate value of using technology as a strategic tool to give your company a competitive advantage. Any company or competitor can purchase COTS and by making this the core tooling strategy to improve efficiency throughout the company you are basically saying that your IT division is nothing more than an expense to the organization. If the CIO is going along for the ride and simply implementing COTS and cutting the overall budget then they are nothing more than an assistant CFO with some technology background.

While Wall Street is probably happy (cost cutting is the best way to get short term stock increases) but those who are truly concerned about the long tern viability of a company will not be able to compete with companies are are looking for IT departments not only to cut costs and to be efficient, but to also provide true value by suggesting and implementing technology that can give them a competitive advantage.

The above may sound like we are putting the blame and burden on the CFO and CIO. However it goes much deeper than that.

The initial proverbial bubble of trust between the business and IT from the business perspective popped at the turn of the century. Business leaders are still skeptical of EVERY new technological buzz word. Don't believe me? Try walking into your CFO or CEO office with the suggestion of Cloud Computing or Social Media. How about Service Oriented Architecture or Web 2.0. Now if you really want to see fire in their eyes, try walking in and talking about Oracle upgrade to 11g. How about upgrading to .NET 2.0 framework or using WPF for our presentation layer. For my final example, if you really want to get your pink slip, offer up Team Foundation Server or an upgrade to SQL Server 2008.

Shame on us for not being able to rebuild that trust over the past decade. Instead of learning from our mistakes of the past, we continue to try and force feed new technology down the throats of the business we MUST learn to think like a business partner and not like a technician. In fact we should try and immerse ourselves in the business culture and be business people with hyper technology knowledge. Further we need to be able to pragmatically propose technology solutions as business people and not as technologists. Finally we need to deliver on what we say without wasting money and later saying that "you have to expect some cost overruns in IT because there are so many unknowns". That's not going to fly in the decade ahead. Say what we are going to deliver and deliver what we say.

If we fail, we will continue to lose trust. This not only hurts IT, it hurts the company.