InformationWeek

June 14, 1999

Priorities 1999:
More Projects, Less Time

IT priorities increasingly reflect business goals

By Beth Davis

Related links:

sidebar: Upward Spiral: Network Bandwidth And Usage

sidebar: Emerging Enterprises Set Their Own IT Agendas

Government Gets Ready

Customer Centricity In The Post-Y2K Era

Smarter Networks

very IT project that enters Andy Clippard's in-box is, by default, an urgent priority. The to-do list is daunting--Clippard and his colleagues at Hallmark Cards Inc. are juggling some 50 active IT initiatives, and there are another 30 vying for approval before year's end.

"There are more people wanting things than there are IT resources--people and dollars--to go around," says Clippard, director of information services for products and operations at the Kansas City, Mo., greeting cards and gifts retailer.

Hallmark's dilemma is echoed in countless companies. IT is a fundamental part of just about every company's operations, and with that distinction comes obligation, requiring IT executives to reevaluate their priorities more often than ever before. Three out of four IT executives are reviewing their business and technology initiatives more frequently now than they were one year ago. That's a jump of nearly 10% over last year, according to an InformationWeek Research study to determine the priorities of 300 IT executives.

That's certainly the case at Hallmark, where sales topped $3.9 billion last year. "We used to set priorities once a year," says Clippard. "It's monthly now."

There's also a time crunch to consider. An increasingly fast pace of change in the business world is the No. 1 reason IT executives are updating their priorities more frequently, according to 79% of this year's respondents. Many industries face escalating challenges: deregulation, globalization, constantly evolving technologies, and technology-savvy customers, suppliers, and business partners. Last, but not least, there's the Internet explosion. "It never slows down," says Vincent Tobkin, co-head of the global technology and telecommunications practice at Bain & Co., a Boston management-consulting firm.

While the pace of change is the leader in driving IT to check and recheck its priorities, management demands were cited by 58% of respondents and competitive pressures by 52%.

The IT executive agenda for 1999 reads more like a business handbook than a technology blueprint. This not only illustrates alignment with business goals, it's a reflection of IT's central role in business. "If we were to look at ourselves three years ago or even two years ago, we were much more inward-focused. I don't think we were as focused on helping the business define its overall strategies," says Diana McKenzie, director of IT, strategy, and planning at Eli Lilly & Co. "We were much more of an enabling organization then. But the landscape is changing."

Companies' growing reliance on IT to transform the business is now the rule: Business goals bubbled to the top of a list of IT and business priorities in last year's and this year's surveys. The top three project-implementation priorities--understanding and meeting customer needs, improving customer service, and streamlining business processes, in that order--edged out more traditional IT initiatives such as increasingbandwidth and training end users on technology.

Still, the survey shows that IT managers are coping with their own needs specific to the present. The fourth, fifth, and sixth entries on the survey's project-implementation priorities list--retaining skilled staff members, keeping up with the pace of change, and completing year 2000 projects--didn't even make it into the top 10 last year.

bar chart

The study also finds that electronic-commerce initiatives are up sharply, in use at 67% of sites, compared with 46% a year ago. Also, a trend toward customer-centric initiatives is becoming deeper and more pervasive, as companies seek to integrate existing products and purchase new customer-relationship management products to improve their bottom-line prospects.

Asked to look beyond the year 2000, survey respondents cited plans to achieve higher system availability, to advance company Web sites, and to add extra bandwidth (see sidebar story, "Upward Spiral: Network Bandwidth And Usage").