InformationWeek

June 14, 1999

Behind The Numbers:
A Look At Priorities From The Bottom Up?

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avid Letterman made them famous, but top 10 lists have long been popular. Whether they concern sports (the top 10 home run hitters or base stealers), entertainment (top 10 grossing movies or best-dressed actresses), or the economy (the world's 10 largest companies measured by sales), it's hard to get away from rankings and the interest they generate.

But you can learn just as much, if not more, by looking way beyond the top 10. In fact, what's on the bottom can be even more telling about a topic than what's on top. For a case in point, consider what the 300 IT executives polled recently by InformationWeek Research listed as their lowest project priorities for implementation in 1999.

Given a list of 23 items, they ranked among the bottom five priorities for the coming year chores such as increasing electronic business-to-consumer sales, enterprise resource planning applications, and supply-chain management. (we only printed the top of the list on this page.) This muted interest seems to confirm evidence such as the declining revenue reported by several major ERP and supply-chain vendors.

If you're under the impression that everyone in IT is rushing to get out electronic-commerce applications given the success of Amazon.com, eBay, and others, the lack of attention to consumer sales via the Web doesn't sound quite right. That's why it's important to look again at the top of the priority list. The top two challenges this year involve improvements in customer service. Apparently, we've moved beyond the "if you build it, they will come" stage. Infrastructure is only one step on the path to success in consumer Web sales. IT executives know that if they emphasize good customer experiences, improved sales will follow.

What are your IT priorities for the next 12 months? Let us know at the address below.

John Eckhouse
Senior Editor/Research
jeckhous@cmp.com

This week in Behind The Numbers:

Sales Surge To Continue

Next Year's Technology Plans

Organizational Changes Required

IT Priorities Change

Sales Surge To Continue

An IT department's priorities are subject to major changes, depending on the level of company revenue available to support them.

If your company's revenue suddenly takes a nose dive, the IT staff may be called upon to drop what they're doing and attack a new project that has the potential to quickly and significantly increase sales.

For now, though, it looks as if that's not a problem. Three-quarters of IT executives surveyed this spring and last fall expect their company's revenue to rise in the next 12 months. Just 6% expect a decline, about half as many as last fall.

Next Year's Technology Plans

Some IT executives look at the calendar and see a crisis, while others see an opportunity. We're talking about the end of the year and the possibility of year 2000 computer problems.

For those able to look beyond Y2K remediation, the coming year could provide relief via freed-up IT budgets. With less to spend on fixing old problems, what's in store? More bandwidth, more availability, more company Web sites, and better customer and in-house data.

What's low on the priority list? Replacing mainframes and portable PCs. And while data warehousing ranks high, online analytical processing ranks near the bottom.

Organizational Changes Required

Making the entire business more customer-focused ranks near the top of the to-do list of nearly every IT manager this year. The top priorities for 1999 are to meet customer needs and improve customer service, while improving customer data quality and bettering customer-relationship management rank near the top for the following year. To do so requires major alterations in corporate culture. IT executives say they'll have to make customer retention a critical yardstick for all managers.

IT Priorities Change

Information technology executives must constantly juggle their responsibilities. Overall, 77% acknowledge updating their IT priorities more frequently than in the past, up from 71% in last year's survey. That figure is even higher at the smallest companies.

But when asked why, the reasons aren't as clear-cut as last year. While 79% say it's due to the faster pace of change and 58% say it's because of management demands, both percentages are down substantially from a year ago. Are IT executives simply getting more accustomed to rapid change and management pressures they encounter every day? That's one possible conclusion.