Improving business awareness within the IT department
will be a major focus for IT directors during 2006.
Early indications from Gartner's annual CIO Agenda study of more
than 1,100 CIOs indicate that the top priority for 2006, as in
2005, will be to deliver projects that enable business growth.
Hard on its heels is a requirement to build business skills
within the IT department, according to Gartner analyst Mark
MacDonald. "The single biggest challenge for IS is to bring in
business skills," he said.
The problem users face, according to MacDonald, is that many of
the processes within IT departments are not geared towards building
and improving business skills within the IT team.
Often IT directors prefer to hire people from outside the
company to take on board new skills, but the best organisations get
new skills from within the business, he told delegates.
MacDonald recommended IT directors hire business relationship
managers from within their own organisation. People who have
reached a glass ceiling in the company make suitable recruits.
MacDonald also suggested IT managers put their teams on end- user
training courses.
"It is the most effective way to teach technology people about
the business," said MacDonald. This will give them first-hand
experience of how end-users actually handle products and systems,
rather than only experiencing the product from an IT or
non-business user perspective.
Improving IT's understanding of the business is key to
successfully developing IT systems to support business
processes.
MacDonald said, "About 40% of business process IT projects fail
because the IT team does not have the right skills or it tries to
own the business process." Once the IT department thinks it owns
the business process, MacDonald warned, "Within eight months, the
CIO is out."
Assessing the challenges for 2006, MacDonald said there would be
a continued focus on business process management, along with a new
emphasis for IT directors to think strategically about
customers.
Budgets are set to increase by around 2.5% in 2006 with European
IT directors prioritising IT investments in business intelligence
tools, mobile workforce enablement projects and collaborative
technology.