Normally I like to pontificate on my opinions and ideas - it's my blog, right? - but today I've been reviewing some new market research by two leading research firms that I think you should see. The Economist magazine referenced both research articles in its April 9th edition in an article entitled "The Cart pulling the Horse".
In the article, two research reports are referenced. The first is a survey conducted by Bain & Company of executives in businesses around the world about their use of information technology. You can find the results of the survey here. The second report that is referenced is an AT Kearney study entitled "Why Today's IT organization Won't Work Tomorrow". You can find that report here. These reports present very different insights and views into IT and its place in business today.
I found the AT Kearney piece much more informative, as it deals much more closely with specific challenges facing IT in the business environment. The Bain study conflates a number of IT and non-IT initiatives and ranks them according to their importance to senior management. Some of the initiatives in the Bain study are IT centric (CRM, Knowledge Management, Supply Chain) and some initiatives have little or no IT component (Change Management, Growth Strategies, Scenario Planning, Strategic Planning).
There are several interesting items that are common across both studies:
- IT today is still much too operationally focused and is not embedded in strategic thinking in most organizations.
- Most businesses report that getting better customer understanding, loyalty and insight are important, but IT has not succeeded at doing those things
- Most IT focus and spending is on tactical, day to day operations and very little on new systems and especially innovative uses of IT
I'm going to analyze these two reports more in a subsequent post. I think they are very valuable to understand where information technology is succeeding in helping businesses compete, and where it is missing the mark.
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