* IT execs rate their accomplishments high, their peers don't agree
A new study from Saugatuck Technology finds IT executives are more impressed with their accomplishments than other business leaders within the company.
Working in partnership with Business Week, Saugatuck Technology asked 350 C-level executives them about the effectiveness of their organizations’ IT departments at executing IT strategies to achieve business goals. IT executives consistently rated their company’s execution of enterprise IT strategies as more effective than did their business executive peers.
Saugatuck researchers say one explanation for the differing views is that people tend to consider themselves and their accomplishments as above average, dubbing this the Lake Wobegon effect.
According to the report, the biggest discrepancies in viewpoints regarding IT effectiveness among IT execs and other company leaders occur for IT strategies that are considered mature, such as business process outsourcing, database consolidation and server consolidation. The gap is more narrow for application outsourcing and service orientation.
The gap between real and perceived value of IT to the business can result in business managers attempting to micromanage IT spending.
In related news, a separate study from Forrester Research finds that CEOs have low expectations of their IT departments.
“The surprising part of the findings was the fact that CEOs were generally satisfied with IT, but at the same time didn’t believe that IT was proactive in terms of business innovation, cost improvements, or effective asset management,” says Laurie Orlov, the Forrester vice president and principal analyst who wrote the report.
Do these results seem to ring true for your company’s leaders opinions about IT? If this is a problem you’ve encountered before, what have you done to solve it? Let me know.
