IT business decisions are being driven by a desire to raise efficiency, while objectives from IT show a balanced desire to fulfil several criteria.
The factors influencing IT departments when making an investment in its strategy is evenly split across a desire to align IT with overall business goals, meeting internal service level agreements, using IT to support revenue support and to better demonstrate the value of IT to business leaders.
Only delivering new functionality to business users was seen as slightly less of an influence.
Trying to align these decisions with what is important to business can be difficult work, particularly when its IT spending is mostly influenced by raising efficiency.
The ability to increase customer satisfaction is the second biggest influencer, while cutting costs and increasing revenues was deemed to be equally as important as each other.
Achieving or maintaining regulatory compliance appears to be less of a concern and improving supplier relationships was revealed to be the least important influencing factor.
When you have split goals between IT and business it’s important to have set processes for decision making.
When it comes to cloud based products, IT is taking the reins in decision making, with it making 45.7% of decisions, individual business units with the guidance of IT only make decisions 24.9% of the time and the CEO or CFO is only the decision maker 6.3% of cases. Combined decisions by all areas occurs 23.2% of the time.
IT tends to be the dominant decision maker when it comes to network and security problems and Big Data and analysis solutions. However, individual business units are taking greater control of decision making for enterprise mobility solutions and voice, video and collaboration products.
Allowing business units to make these decisions more frequently than IT, suggests that these are areas which are more easily implemented and cause less headaches to IT.
The role of the CEO and CFO in decision making is typically reserved to around 6% of the time, however, their influence increases when it comes to network and security (14.2%) and Big Data and analysis (14.6%).
This suggests the importance and complexities behind these two areas. Security is of course an extremely important decision. While their increased role in decision making around Big Data may come as a result of a fear of data breaches, cost of deployment and regulatory fears.
All figures come from Kable’s ICT Customer Insight survey, which polled 2685 respondents, from across the world in Q4 2014.
The survey findings include data on key entities involved in the decision making process for purchasing products in different areas, the importance of various business objectives in influencing IT investment strategies and the importance of various IT objectives in influencing IT investment strategies.
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