Senior management commitment to the success of IT: the missing link to success

"Senior management commitment to IT" - a phrase which seems to be understood as a critical success factor within organisational success, but so often not obtained. Organisations are realising that IT can improve business efficiencies and performance, and can be an enabler of new products and services to the business and, ultimately, give them an edge over their competitors.

According to Gartner, organisations spend an average of approximately 2% of their turnover on expensive technology. But many IT initiatives fail, and the high price that "C-level" executives pay for the technology is not realised.

In the 2002 Engagement Project Office Survey conducted by KPMG, it was found that over half (56%) of participating companies said they had experienced failed projects within the preceding 12 months with an average failed project cost of just under R90 million. The largest cost of failure of all participants was R1.6 billion.

Weill and Ross (Harvard Business Review, June 2002) attribute these failures to lack of management commitment, and indicate that when senior managers abdicate their IT responsibilities, disaster often occurs. Senior management should create a transformational vision for the organisation. They should provide strategic direction for the rest of the organisation to follow and be the drivers of commitment for all stakeholders. To do this, they need to understand what these IT initiatives are.

Weill and Ross suggest six initiatives which should require top management involvement: the spend on IT, prioritising IT projects, which areas of IT should be centralised and standardised, how good various IT services should be, the appetite for IT security risk and accountability outside of IT for failed IT initiatives.

Management needs to display commitment from inception to completion of an initiative. It is most important that this commitment is maintained throughout the lifecycle of the initiative, and not only during the initial decision-making period. In many projects in which KPMG has been involved, top management displays enormous amounts of enthusiasm at the outset, and once the decisions have been made, senior managers leave the remainder of the project in the hands of IT management and the lower level employees, not realising the importance of their continued commitment and support. During the lifecycle of an initiative, there are many decisions which are made in which management need to be involved.

Lack of management involvement may result in projects not maintaining their focus to the business strategy, IT spend not directed to business priorities, deviation from the initial objectives, emphasis placed in areas that do not benefit the business, and business value never being measured and thus not realised and input from the incorrect levels of the organisation resulting in failed projects.

Despite the evidence which so clearly points to the importance of senior management commitment to IT, it continues to be a struggle to obtain. Top management should place high priority on their continued involvement in IT initiatives to enable an IT function which is a strong enabler to business and drives success and change in the organisation.