IT at the crossroads

Larry Dignan at ZDNet summarizes a nugget from a Forrester analysis of Business/IT perspectives

Sure there’s collaboration between the business and IT on back office (46 percent said there was cooperation), but sales and marketing, R&D and product engineering lagged big time. Thirty three percent of sales and marketing execs said IT collaborates with them and 28 percent of R&D and product engineering considered corporate IT a partner. In other words, the stuff attached to revenue sees corporate IT as a barrier.

In some ways, it’s even more dismal.

In the research for my new book, several different companies told me even as they were developing “smart” products and services (i.e. with technology embedded in their product) they were doing it “around” IT.

Some of the comments I heard

• If we involve IT, it will turn into a 4 year, $ 50 million project
• If we turn to IT, they will just call in IBM or Accenture. Sorry, we are a 100 year old company – how would they ever know our products and customers better than we do?
• If we turn to IT, we will not just risk project failure. It could hurt our brand or lead to product liability.
• We find our R&D tax credit  accounting is cleaner if we keep such projects under product engineering, not IT

When it comes to Marketing, it is just as bad even as technology in the form of social media and Big Data around point of sale and customer metrics explodes. Gartner believes by 2017, the Chief Marketing Officer will spend more on technology than the CIO.

The CIO in many companies continues to be focused on the back office and infrastructure even as technology finally allows to focus on revenue and growth.

Here’s the irony. 85% of 90% of the CIO’s budget is now with IT and telecom vendors. Many of these vendors will confidently talk about how they are well positioned to sell to the business executive. Maybe they are, but they are not well positioned to explain away they are not part of today’s IT . A big part.