The world of the Chief Information Officer is in flux. Some would argue it has ever been thus! Organisations are being urged to embrace the digitisation of the enterprise by way of social media, cloud and mobile technology. Business units are increasingly going over IT’s head when making technology purchase decisions, a term which we commonly refer to as Shadow IT.
Not only are CIOs expected to facilitate technology adoption in an organisation, they must be able to manage the risks of Shadow IT whilst at the same time juggling their own priorities: maintaining current IT services, developing long term strategies and seeking innovation to improve their organisation’s efficiency.
Recently, Logicalis surveyed over 60 Australian CIOs and IT executives to understand how they cope with and respond to these multiple demands and how they view their role and the future of IT in this rapidly changing world.
In this blog, we highlight the key findings from this survey.
For 69% of respondents, the CIO and the IT organisation share responsibility for IT strategy and decisions. Meanwhile, 24% of respondents share that responsibility with Line of Business Managers. However, only 4% expect this to continue, citing the reason that Line of Business Managers would need a great deal of IT expertise to truly take over IT’s role in making IT decisions.
Despite this, the tension between CIOs and Line of Business Managers remains, forcing CIOs to consciously adopt service-led transformations to maintain their relevance in the organisation.
A whopping 46% of respondents still spend over half their time on daily IT duties or keeping the lights on – a perennial challenge for those in IT... However, the desire to focus on strategy planning and innovation is evident. As much as 59% of respondents believe that day-to-day IT management should consume less than a quarter of their time. Currently, only 23% of respondents claim to have achieved this.
Logicalis believes that Service Defined Enterprises enable CIOs to transform the IT department and operate IT infrastructure and systems in a more agile and cost-efficient manner, allowing them to place a greater focus on strategic activities.
Despite having a strong desire to spend more time on strategy, the number of respondents willing to outsource different IT technologies is relatively low. For example, the majority of respondents, 21%, believe that servers and server management can or should be outsourced, whereas security is rated as the top technology to manage in-house.
In spite of having 21% of respondents unfamiliar with the concept of Service Defined Enterprise, 77% of respondents said to be aware of the concept and agreed that it represents the way forward for IT, even if their organisations were at different stages of the journey.
Of these SDE-aware organisations, 19% embrace it fully and have an articulated strategy, 51% understand its importance but have yet to formulate a strategy, and 27% are in the education and assessment phase.
The respondents were also asked to indicate their organisation’s level of maturity on a number of aspects of IT – those that reflect their progress towards a Service Defined Enterprise.
With Gartner anticipating a ‘digital dragon’ – a force of digital disruption that is reshaping all industries – and Forrester claiming that the ‘future of every business is digital’, it is evident that the management of these key technology decisions is absolutely critical to an organisations’ survival. The Service Defined Enterprise represents the means by which CIOs can cope and thrive in this ever-changing IT world.
To delve deeper into the findings of this Logicalis survey, download the full report ‘The Case for a Service Defined Enterprise’ on our website.