What crisis of confidence? Cut IT some slack

In September, Gartner presented a list of CIOs’ biggest challenges right now, and apart from things that address the here and now of IT (AI, new security challenges, talent gaps), one of the main pain points the 12,000 CIOs in the survey highlighted was a more traditional issue: demonstrating to management that investments in IT have a business value.

Last week, a report came out citing research from IBM that showed that company management’s trust in the IT department has decreased over the past decade. Only 36% of CEOs in the survey said they had confidence that the IT department can deliver basic services, compared to 64% in the same survey in 2013.

Does this mean we have a crisis of confidence? If management must be convinced that new IT investments have any value at all and they also don’t believe that the IT department can handle the most basic things anymore, it would seem so. But I’m not so sure.

Because if you read the advice given by Gartner, IBM, and other experts, a lot is familiar. It’s more or less the exact same things that have been highlighted at least as long as I’ve been covering these issues, which is around 20 years now: IT and the business must go hand in hand; IT leaders must speak to the company management in the language of the business; IT leaders must find balance between uptime and innovation. None of this is new, which leads me to believe the problems aren’t new either.

As an outside observer, in a way, I become a bit dull. How can it still be a matter of “IT and the business talking to each other”? Is it still seen as a special interest or a necessary evil in companies? In a world where most of the most valuable companies are IT companies and where IT is singled out as decisive for the competitiveness of entire continents?

Well, in part I unfortunately think it is. But at the same time, I believe that this goes in cycles, depending on what tests the outside world puts companies and IT departments through. Take the pandemic, for example, when CIOs and IT were hailed as heroes for helping companies adapt so quickly. It was, of course, about a “classic” IT assignment: tools, functionality, processes, support. Something that a well-functioning IT organization has good opportunities to excel at.

Right now, however, it’s not about responding to a pandemic but to AI ​​hype. Now, company management demands to keep up with the AI ​​development and so the innovation/uptime dilemma comes to life again, at least at the many companies where IT is expected to handle both. That balance is difficult to find in ordinary times, but even more so now that a completely new field of technology, which requires new competence, has come and put everything on hold. It’s no wonder that it becomes difficult to both “keep the lights on” and invent completely new light sources at the same time. 

Of course, there’s no doubt that CIOs and IT departments are under pressure, simply because technology development has gone so fast now that you don’t have time to either change processes or acquire skills at the same pace. But it’s a temporary problem, as long as business leaders can actually see the value of IT over time and not just as shiny AI things dangling in front of their noses.

Because honestly, for 20 years I’ve heard that IT has to know the business and learn to talk to management so they understand. Isn’t it time that company management learns to talk to IT?