Inside the Organization

Chief concerns amongst CIOs when dealing with top management, business managers, users and their own IT teams

Monday, January 03, 2005

Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Here we look at the chief concerns amongst IT heads in dealing with their staff.

Top management concerns
Justifying the cost for an IT investment seems to be on everyone's minds. After the dot com bust, and the nosedive taken by world economy immediately after, most companies are wary of all the benefits promised by IT. They want to be sure that what they're investing in is right, and will give them the expected returns. Our survey reflects this, with 45 percent of the respondents claiming cost justification as their biggest concern when convincing top management for a new IT implementation. Clearly, the management wants to know what business benefits IT will bring to the table, just like any other investment. And this holds true for management companies of all sizes, which was also reflected in our survey. About 43 percent of the CIOs who raised this as their primary concern were from organizations with more than Rs 500 crore turnover, 32 percent were from companies of under Rs 100 crore turnover and 11 percent from Rs 100-500 crore turnover companies. 

As expected, cost justification is a major issue with most CIOs having low IT budgets of under a crore of rupees. They're the ones who also have difficulty explaining the technology to the top management. Clearly, lower the budgets, higher is the need to justify investments in technology. That's why the second concern in challenge one is about explaining the technology.

Challenge 2 is the reverse of challenge 1, with the first one being about explaining the business benefits, and the second being about cost justification. 

Dealing with business line managers
What is the biggest headache for a business line manager? Whatever it is, it's surely not related to IT, as reflected by the IT managers we surveyed. Forty two percent of the CIOs surveyed had trouble getting business line managers to participate in technology implementations, and 23 percent of them were trying hard to get them to use technology themselves. Largely IT heads of Rs 500 plus crore companies raised the first concern. The second concern was equally spread across companies of all sizes. 

Getting business line managers to participate in technology implementations is a pretty serious issue. On a scale of 1 to 10, 27 percent of the CIOs gave an eight out of 10 for this issue. It clearly shows where IT stands in most organizations today. Despite all benefits that IT can bring, there seems to be a mental block towards using it.

Surprisingly, this issue was raised largely by CIOs having IT teams of six to 100 people. Those with larger teams didn't really have an issue, possibly because they had enough manpower to go around for supporting the IT infrastructure. It didn't seem to be an issue with companies having low IT staff either, possibly because they were smaller companies where convincing managers to use technology wasn't such a major task. Surprisingly, this seems to be an issue amongst senior IT managers with 10 or more years of experience. 

The second major concern amongst IT heads was getting business line managers to use technology themselves. Surprisingly, this was also a major concern amongst CIOs with more than 15 years of experience in the industry. 

Users headaches
This was the only area where the concerns were spread almost evenly across all the reasons. They don't follow policies, are too demanding having unrealistic expectations, increase the security threats, and don't know anything were all given almost equal weightage by the IT heads. Clearly, user management is the most challenging issue amongst all IT heads. Still, the one reason that was slightly higher was regarding the users not following IT policies. Surprisingly, respondents from medium-sized companies having Rs 100-500 crore turnover didn't seem to find this a problem, only the smaller ones (sub Rs 100 crore turnover) and the large ones (> Rs 500 crore) raised this issue the most. 

On a 10 points scale, 25 percent of the CIOs rated this as eight out of 10, which is pretty serious. Very few respondents gave this concern a low seriousness rating on a 10 points scale. 

Managing the IT team
Most IT teams were either completely in-house or a mix of in-house and outsourced. Very few companies completely outsourced it. Further, most of the companies had IT teams with six to 100 people. Coming back to the survey results. Thirty three percent said they had difficulty in finding and retaining the right people. Incidentally, 43 percent of them said their professional ambition was to move to a larger role in the same organization. Could there be a correlation? We found that 14 percent of the CIOs who rated 'developing a second line of leadership' as their primary concern had this ambition. Surprisingly, finding and retaining the right people was largely an issue found in organizations with Rs 500 plus crore turnover. This is perhaps because many of the large companies in the survey also had low IT budgets, which could mean an under-developed IT infrastructure. 

The second major challenge CIOs face with their IT teams is to keep them motivated. This doesn't come as a surprise either, since most of their time is spent in finding and retaining the right people. ¨

Page(s)   1