Most CEOs view IT as a paradox, being both a positive growth enabler and a constraint, delegates heard yesterday at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2005 in Cape Town.
Gartner trends analyst Mark Raskino said this perception among business leaders became evident from studying surveys conducted among CEOs during the past six to 12 months.
"When seeking opportunities for growth, business leaders look for forces that will change and reshape markets. These are forces that disrupt the status quo, lead to uncertainty and create profit opportunities."
He said a recent Economist survey showed that business leaders perceive technology in general (and IT within that) as one of the top forces for change over the next three years.
A recent Gartner/Forbes survey suggests a number of particular areas where IT is perceived as being valuable, including increasing speed to market, fostering innovation, providing real-time information, improving productivity and using information as a competitive weapon.
However, Raskino pointed out that more than three-quarters of senior business executives believe a lack of flexibility in IT business applications is a significant inhibitor of change in the organisation.
Other major problems reported by more than half of the CEOs surveyed include the lack of integration between core enterprise applications and the inability to find new applications that align with business processes.
"So IT leaders are faced with a difficult problem. The CEO who wants change expects IT to help deliver it, but he or she is unlikely to offer a 20% increase in IT budgets to make it easy.
"As a result, IT leaders forced to make incremental changes seem to be creating inertia."
The CEO perceives this as a paradox, Raskino said, adding that CEOs expect that IT should help them grow, yet an organisation`s systems seem to be almost impenetrably complex and resistant.
Therefore, he argued, IT should assist in managing strategic change, which has four key elements: organisation structure, infrastructure, process and mindsets.
"Only projects that actively address all four will succeed. All other projects will be slow to deliver benefits or failures. As IT departments evolve, we expect to see them take more active roles addressing the culture, structure and process elements. So far the process element is the one which most seem to be engaging with," he said.
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