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Leadership: How to Get IT Research You Can Use

Help the IT consultancies understand what kind of research you really need to align with business.

By Susan Cramm

September 01, 2005 — CIO — As a newly minted CIO in the early 1990s, I attended a Gartner CIO conference and wondered if I had made a huge mistake by going back into IT. Although I forget the name of the conference, it should have been called "CIO Whining: Perspectives on Incorrigible Users." The ’90s were an ugly decade for IT: CIOs (actually, many were IT directors) were, by a long mile, a bunch of poorly dressed, middle-aged white guys who could be found hiding in their offices. The world had changed around them—both in terms of business needs and technology capabilities—and they were strangers in a strange land.

Today, CIOs are a different breed. Although the demographic hasn’t shifted a lot, CIOs aren’t whining anymore. They understand the principles of good IT leadership and are working hard to bring theory into practice. Most CIOs have good relationships with senior executives and are involved with major business decisions. They understand the importance of strategy alignment, value, efficiency and service. They are building their relationships and organizations so that they can implement improvements in governance, portfolio management, architectural road maps, change management and process discipline.

We have turned the corner, and the future is bright for IT and its leaders. For this reason, I was taken aback when Forrester contacted me recently to discuss research titled "CIOs Struggle to Make the CIO Job Live Up to Its Promise." I don’t see most CIOs struggling—just working hard. I also don’t think the CIO job has failed to live up to its promise. The fact is, organizations are at varying levels of maturity in their use of IT.

Overall, the state of IT research is disappointing. It’s voluminous, in some cases incomprehensible, and repetitious. The promise of IT is real. The research organizations need direction so that they can serve the interests of the hands that feed them.

Forrester didn’t ask, but I think research titled "The C-Level Focus Necessary to Exploit IT’s Full Potential" would reflect today’s reality and provide much more useful insights. I would love to see research that leverages lessons from other disciplines and shares experiences from companies that are mature in their use of technology. To realize IT’s promise, you need answers to the following questions:

1. How can IT be fully incorporated into the business-planning process? IT needs to be included as a component of business strategy—as are markets, products, pricing, supply, finance and organization—and not as a follow-on plan developed by the IT function. This is a particularly difficult challenge because many companies develop high-level plans using informal processes that don’t provide the level of detail necessary to drive the IT agenda.

 

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