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A third (33%) of IT decision makers agree that their department struggles to take a proactive and long-term strategic view according to new research from Vanson Bourne and INTERXION HOLDING NV.
Time constraints faced by European IT departments is a major contributing factor to this: 99% of respondents said they spend at least some of their time fighting fires rather than carrying out proactive, strategically important work that would benefit the company, with an average 37% of time spent in this way. So it’s no surprise that when asked why they are struggling to take a long-term view, the most common answer from respondents was that they always have to deal with short term reactive business requirements (80%).
This was closely followed by budgets getting tighter (69%) as well as the fact that some IT departments don't have any insight into the long term plan for the business (53%). In fact, a quarter of respondents said that their department doesn’t have a plan in place to support the business plan at all.
However, IT departments’ strategic priorities for the next 18 months do reflect a desire to work more closely with the business. Although the top answer here was reducing operational expenditure (48%), the second most popular answer (45%) was increasing the flow of information around the organisation and more than a third of respondents (38%) cited improving business performance and decision making as a priority for the IT department.
“Time and again we see those organisations that take a strategic approach to IT delivering faster growth and greater shareholder value, so it’s disappointing to see that many businesses are still missing out on this competitive advantage,” commented Ian McVey, Director, Enterprise & SI, Interxion.
He continued: “It’s understandable that, in today’s tough economic climate, reduced resources and stretched teams can result in a focus on the urgent rather than the important. The question is ‘what is the opportunity cost?’ Lack of resources in the long run destroys shareholder value. Creating the headroom to assess, for example, migration to cloud computing is vital for a company’s competitive advantage. Those companies that enable their CIOs and IT teams to do this will win out. Those that don’t will trail behind.”
