Global business leaders are becoming increasingly frustrated with the ‘out of step’ nature of their IT staff as they struggle, and fail, to align IT goals to business ones says a new piece of research from The Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network. The research finds that the vast majority of business decision makers are dedicating more time and attention to understanding the strategic implications of disruptive technologies and the more they find out the less they like it.

Business leaders are trying measure their IT spend against the benefits which they receive and finding a large deficit. The research shows that nearly 70 percent of global managers surveyed believe technology has become “far more important” to their business, however less than half (47 percent) of the 250 executives polled rate the level of innovation in their IT groups as good or very high. In contrast, 52 percent feel it is poor or just making progress. Only 42 percent said their IT groups are doing a good job of becoming a more strategic, responsive and valued business partner, compared to 58 percent who view their IT transition as poor or only making moderate headway.

richard garratt
Rchard Garratt, DImension Data

Designing a new scorecard for performance of IT teams

In terms of performance metrics, 46 percent of survey respondents believe that ensuring the reliability, scalability, and security of IT infrastructures is the most effective metric, while 38 percent of respondents believe an IT organization’s ability to bring ideas and solutions for furthering business performance is a relevant metric. Slightly less important was the quality and timeliness of application delivery (36 percent), incidence and speed of problem resolution (29 percent), and customer satisfaction with tech-driven business interface (27 percent).

 Dave Murray, head of thought leadership at the BPI Network said: “From the C-suite to operational units, senior managers are eager to see progress in implementing a broad range of technologies that increase their agility, improve customer experience, and make their companies more competitive. We believe this constitutes a new scorecard for IT, with greater emphasis on IT’s role in driving business growth and market differentiation.”

 A high 85 percent of business executives surveyed said they are devoting more time to understanding the strategic implications of technologies. In particular, those participating in the BPI Network survey see major benefits from data center and cloud transformation. Most notably, they anticipate: ”Increased agility and responsiveness to business changes (70 percent of respondents), Greater cost efficiencies (57 percent), Faster time to market (47 percent).

Relative to their data centers, some 48 percent expect to modernize and upgrade these facilities, and 44 percent expect their companies to migrate to a hybrid IT model combining both on-premise data center and cloud.

We believe this constitutes a new scorecard for IT, with greater emphasis on IT’s role in driving business growth and market differentiation

Dave Murray, BPI Network

Richard Garratt of Dimension Data said: “Companies in every industry and every part of the world are realizing that they must embrace a new model of business responsive data centers and networks in order to drive innovation, agility, and speed. Today’s discussion around the data center and cloud-enabled hybrid IT models is rooted in the need to respond more effectively and rapidly to the strategic needs of enterprises in a very fast changing business environment.” 

The BPI Network research was undertaken in Q2 2015 and surveyed executives across a range of titles, company sizes, industry sectors and geographies. Some 22 percent of respondents represented companies with revenues of $1 billion or more and 31 percent had annual sales of between $100 million and $1 billion. The balance had revenues of less than $100 million.

To download the complementary report, please visit http://reinventdatacenters.com/transformation-report