Most business leaders have no faith in IT

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The majority of European business leaders do not believe that IT is a facilitator for achieving their business priorities.
 
Market research firm Vanson Bourne questioned 650 business and IT leaders across Europe and found that 72% of the business leaders had no faith in IT helping them to hit their business targets.
 
In addition, two-thirds of the IT leaders acknowledged the lack of faith, with 67% saying they do not believe "that the business considers IT systems a help".
 
In the survey executives cited improving customer service and engagement (70%), cutting costs (70%) and being more productive by "doing more with less" (67%) as their top priorities for 2012.
 
The majority of business leaders (92%) said they would like to see improvements made to the way their business functions to drive productivity, including improving employee productivity and empowerment (74%), information system integration (71%) and collaboration between departments (68%).
 
However, most business decision-makers (65%) do not feel that IT is helping them make the changes they require. Interestingly the vast majority of IT leaders recognised that their systems are not good enough, with 80% reporting that their IT is not performing well with regards to areas such as managing unplanned customer interactions (45%), gaining a single view of the business need (44%) and bringing data onto mobile devices (43%).
 
Projects taking longer than planned (36%), the inflexibility and insularity of business systems (27%) and getting IT to absorb and react in a timescale that matches expectations (17%) are the key challenges cited by senior business leaders.
 
IT and business leaders agreed that they do not work collaboratively on projects and priorities, demonstrating a lack of transparency and understanding between IT and business. That lack of collaboration has led to 23% of business leaders bypassing IT altogether and adopting cloud based solutions.

IT leaders recognise this with more than half (56%) believing part of the business has already adopted cloud-based solutions, and 42% believing they have done so because they need the systems up and running quickly.
 
Over half (53%) of IT leaders using business process management systems considered themselves "helpful" within their business, compared with just 31% of non-BPM users.