IT Concerns 2005 Part-1

Consider the world around the IT chief of any organization. He has to primarily deal with five constituencies; the five arms of the star around him, if you will. First is the top management, usually epitomized by the CEO or the board of directors, from whom he gets his budgetary and other approvals and to whom he is answerable on performance and returns on the investments made.

There are the line of business managers, some his peers, some seniors and some juniors in the organization, who are the actual users of the systems he is putting in place, and whose businesses depend on them. In many organizations, the funds for the IT investments may originate from the budgets of these line of business managers.

Third in the list are the other users in the organization, the employees who report in to the line of business managers. Fourth are his own people, the IT team; those on whom he depends to set up and run the system properly.

The fifth arm of the star is outside his own organization, but is equally if not more crucial. These are the vendors and service providers with whom he has to negotiate service level agreements and delivery schedules, whom he has to cajole and placate, threaten and plead with.

How does he see each of these arms of the star around him? What are the issues he faces in dealing with them and their expectations of him? What are his expectations from them? How does he deal with them?

And then there are the products and technologies that he implements and oversees. What are the issues with them?

These are the questions which we set out to find answers to. In this first part, we present the top-line analysis. More in-depth findings will be presented next month, after we have completed face-to-face meetings with some of the respondents.

A Web Survey
This survey was administered to the respondents over the Web. The questionnaire included single choice options, multiple choice options as well as free text fields. The database of respondents was uploaded and a script mailed out an invite to the e-mail addresses, with a unique URL being provided to each potential respondent. The respondent could access the survey by clicking on the URL, and could answer at his or her own pace. That is they could leave the survey any time, and come back by clicking on the same URL. This time, they would automatically be taken to where they had left off. We have not included incomplete questionnaires in the final analysis. A booster field survey was also commissioned, which covered another 54 respondents. The results presented here are from the Web survey. The in-depth analysis, which will be presented in next month's issue, will combine responses from both the groups. Incidentally, this is not the first time that PCQuest is using the Web to get inputs for its stories. When we did the Best IT implementation awards this year, we invited entries over the Web. Over a hundred entries were received in that case.

What does the senior Indian IT manager spend most of his time on?

A. Vendor issues



Similar international studies indicate that aligning the IT infrastructure with the business is the top most priority, the one on which CIO's spend most of their time. But in India the scenario is completely different. Here, most time and effort goes into handling service provider and vendor issues, followed by product and technology issues, with business and people issues coming third out of three.

Only 10 out of the 57 respondents rated business and people issues as the one taking up most of their time and effort. Interestingly, seven out of the ten were in companies with a turnover of Rs 500 crore or more. Seems that the bigger organizations are moving towards the international pattern.

Ok. With vendors, what are the key concerns of CIOs?

A. Managing service provider SLAs and time and cost overruns



Here we asked the respondents to identify their top two concerns in the order of priority. The votes that these two got as first

and second dwarfed the votes that the other issues got, signifying the intensity of the problem they are facing.

Across any demographic cut of the respondent base, the picture is the same-Time/Cost overruns or SLA's come up as the key pain points when dealing with vendors and service providers. Is there an issue of over promising and under pricing during the sales pitch? Vendors would be well advised to put serious efforts into resolving these two issues.

On the other hand, managing consultants and intermediaries is much less of a concern, as can be seen from the graph. The reasons are perhaps obvious, and a possible inference from these two values could be that there will be an increase in the usage of consultants as intermediaries with vendors in getting IT projects off the ground.

How are IT managers currently handling these concerns?



A. We did ask that question. Watch this space next month for the answers, along with samples of what they are actually doing.

You said that the second most time consuming factor was technology and product issues. What about them?



A.Well, we did ask that question too. Here are the top two concerns with technology and products:

Deploying new applications and technologies and network security/spam management



The key challenge for nearly 50% of the IT managers we surveyed was in deploying new applications and technologies. Out of these, more than 60% are those who have also listed giving a justification of cost /ROI/TCO to the top management as a top concern (see top management concern, later on).

Interestingly, of this, nearly half upgraded their IT infrastructure only when there was a requirement. May be there's a correlation between the two? Is it the pain in the upgrade process or is it the justifications required that is leading to this? Or is it simple pragmatism?

All other concerns in the list rated far lower, with network security and spam management occupying the second position. This isn't surprising considering the growing number of security threats today.

This was closely followed by the challenge of ensuring reliability and availability of IT infrastructure. Interestingly, most of the respondents who gave availability/reliability as their top two challenges also said that they spent most of their time on managing vendors and services. Nearly 50% of these responses were from large organizations having a turnover of more than 500 Crores. Developing software in-house coming in next as a concern.

That leaves business and people issues. How did that fare?



A.Finally, we have a mirroring of the international scenario here. The top concern is the same in India also:

Integrating technology with business



Some of these areas, we have delved into, in detail. The analysis follows.

Dealing with the Boss



Of the five arms of the star around the IT chief's universe (see the cover piece), the top arm is the CEO or the board. Let us start our analysis with the concerns there.

What is the key concern when dealing with the top management when it comes to new purchases and deployments?

A.Cost / TCO/ ROI justification



Followed by

Explaining the business benefits



As can be seen from the graph, all other concerns pale into insignificance in front of these two. Note that the CEO needing more solution options is not a concern with too many of the respondents.

Dealing with Peers



When it comes to peers, what are the concern areas?

A. Getting them to participate in implementations



Getting a buy in for a new implementation seems easy to do, but when it comes to participating in the implementation itself, apparently, it is a different matter altogether.

How intense is this problem?



We had the respondents rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is the least and 10 is the highest, the severity of the concern with Line of Business Managers. The response curve is plotted below. The second curve is the rating by those who had said that business and people issues take up most of their time (first question). Interestingly enough, all of them have rated LoB manager issues at 5 and above!

That brings us to the IT team.

What's your top concern regarding your IT team?

A. Finding and retaining the right people



Finding and retaining the right people came as a pretty serious issue from most people, giving a weighted average score of 7.4 on a scale of 10. It's not that they faced this issue because they had small teams. In fact, most of them had sizeable teams of 26-100 people working under them. Moreover, most of them were also from companies with turnovers from 100 crores upwards, and even having good IT budgets. So maybe it's not a question of paying good salaries, but something else.

Providing support to an IT infrastructure tends to get boring beyond a point of time, unless the organization is spending heavily on IT. Maybe that's why the second biggest concern raised by the respondents was to keep their IT teams motivated. Maybe that's why most respondents kept a mix of both internal as well as outsourced manpower.

The second curve above plots the seriousness score of respondents who said that finding and retaining the right people was their primary concern in this area. As can be seen, it fairly closely follows the overall graph.

What about the other users?

A. 1. They do not follow policies that have been set: 35%



2. They're too demanding/have unrealistic expectations: 26%



Lack of training also came up as a point of concern. In most organizations, there are always those users who think they know everything, and feel they don't need to follow any policies. So no surprises when most IT managers have highlighted this to be their biggest concern. In fact, when asked for how serious was this issue on a scale of 1 to 10, nobody rated it below 5. The second most serious concern wasn't very surprising either, that users were too demanding and had unrealistic expectations from the IT team. In fact, in a separate question, most respondents had rated meeting user expectations as a big challenge.



This reminds one of the ever-going conflict between users and the IT team, where both sides keep blaming each other on everything that goes wrong.

How serious is the concern with other users?



Fairly serious, if you see the adjacent graph. Almost all respondents rated the seriousness of the concern at 5 or above on our scale of 10. The second curve is those respondents who stated that their concern was that users do not follow policies (the top concern as in the previous graph). ¨

Anil Chopra and Krishna Kumar