Talk of an economic downturn brings efforts around IT aligning with the business to the fore as high-tech leaders are tasked with validating their worth and proving company budget dollars invested in technology are well spent.

Industry organizations and analyst firms such as the Society for Information Management (SIM) and Forrester Research separately examine the relationship between IT organizations and the business they should ideally be partnering with to advance business efforts to better compete and drive revenue. Survey data from 300 organizations released this week at SIMposium 2008 shows that new CIOs spend about 24% of their time on managing relationships with the business, 18% is dedicated to managing IT staff relations and 13% of CIO time is invested in strategy.

"Most organizations have a pretty good relationship between IT and the business now, but business expectations of what IT could and should be doing are still beyond what is actually happening," says Peter Whatnell, SIM president elect and CIO of Sunoco. "IT lags a bit behind the business, but the group can be challenged by many factors including the economy."

Forrester Research also this week released survey results that suggested business leaders feel, at least in reference to certain technologies, that they could better choose, manage and support technologies than IT. For instance, 59% viewed it as a top priority for staff to garner business process analysis skills, 53% said the same about project management and 47% indicated a similar interest in information modeling.

Part of the reason CIOs and CEOs remain out of synch could be that business leaders don't identify IT as the providers of technology they may very well support. For instance, 64% of respondents identified traditional enterprise software providers such as SAP and Oracle as the primary source for technology. Fifty-eight percent identified business applications developed by IT staff and 43% pointed to third-party or contracted application developers as their primary source for technology solutions. Forrester pointed out that despite the source of the application, internal IT is most likely involved with the provided technology.

"It is likely, though not specifically noted, that all of the top-ranked sources of solutions involved IT in some capacity or other," the report reads. 

All this data supports the argument made by Forrester's senior analyst Evelyn Hubbert who contends in the report, "Role overview: IT marketing manager" that IT needs to better communicate its services and ultimately its value to the business. According to Forrester, IT's efforts don't go completely unnoticed, but dedicating a staff member to manage the relationship with the business and gauge how IT can better meet demand for new services.

"As the goal for the marketing manager is to assist in moving IT up the value chain -- from an infrastructure provider to a solution and partner providing innovation to the business -- the most important skill is to translate available technology into added value so that these technologies truly contribute to the business's competitive position," the report reads.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.