IT Must Make or Break: Gartner
IT Must Make or Break: Gartner
April 24, 2007: The IT industry is under siege as a lack of vision from enterprise IT leaders has CEOs failing to see the point.
It’s news that comes from Garner’s San Francisco 2007 Symposium/ITexpo where Gartner analysts got straight to the point in telling their audience to up their game. The event’s opening address described how a lack of vision from enterprise IT leaders could have the IT industry facing imminent dangers as CEOs fail to see the business enabling benefits of IT.
According to Steve Prentice, VP and distinguished analyst at Garter, CEOs are continually looking for new ideas but they don’t they don’t see them coming from the IT department. “The industry seems to be missing the visionaries, whose drive and ambition to challenge conventional wisdom either with technology innovation of business process innovation can make the difference,” he says.
The problem is occurring in most enterprises where Gartner believes, too many people are waiting to receive simple, re-package, ‘spoon-fed’ solutions for applying technology to meet an existing business need. “Waiting for another CRM solution, or Business Intelligence or knowledge management, or the next enterprise resource planning solution,” said Prentice.
It’s a problem further highlighted by a shift in IT spending patterns from the centralised IT unit to other business unit. Gartner believes on average, 30 percent of IT funding is no longer travelling to the centralised IT function, but instead to various business units, a suggestion that business leaders are looking for creative answers elsewhere.
But it’s not just an internal problem, there is also the treat from outside the organisation. With nations like China and India waiting in the wings of organisational hesitance, Gartner believes all business must have a strategy for dealing with these influences.
While China sits as the manufacturing powerhouse, India is quickly becoming the global hub of IT services, both countries have the power to affect every major corporation in the world. “Every business, whether they are directly engaged with the Chinese economy or not must have a China strategy,” said Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner.
Innovation is again the key for ensuring IT leaders remain relevant in a changing world. Gartner believes inspiration is needed to pish visionary ideas and technological advance especially with the ongoing digital revolution and data explosion that is currently showing no signs of slowing down.