4 Ways IT Can Inspire Business Confidence

6 Ways To Master The Data-Driven Enterprise

Do your business colleagues trust you? An EMC outlook report has uncovered some disturbing situations in the state of business in the data-driven age.

Only 30% of the 3,600 global business leaders surveyed in the report, released in April, said their companies are able to act upon their information in real-time. Nearly half of respondents admitted to not knowing how to get value from their data. Less than one fifth of respondents (24%) consider themselves "very good" at turning data into useful insights and information. When it comes to the data-driven enterprise, IT has a big job ahead and it's got to be completed fast.

The news is worse for IT than it first appears. Much worse.

"Seventy-five percent of business leaders who come through our doors do not believe IT can deliver the innovation needed to transform the organization," Jeremy Burton, president of EMC, told InformationWeek in an interview.

That's a staggering vote of no confidence in IT.

"Nine months ago we started seeing a bunch of business guys come through our center, and they didn't have the head of IT in tow," Burton said. "They would bring folks from R&D and others, but no IT."

According to Burton, the impetus for these visits by business leaders varies from company to company, "But the punch line is that they're looking at building custom software, something that largely hasn't been done in the last 10 to 15 years. And they think IT can't do it. So they hire dev teams to change and transform the company. That's what prompted us to do the survey; to figure out what's going on."

The research was conducted by Institute for the Future and Vanson Bourne on behalf of EMC. Vanson Bourne surveyed 3,600 business leaders across 18 countries, from mid-size to large enterprises in nine industries, to determine top business imperatives required for success today and over the next decade. The Institute for the Future led the creation of the study to identify and forecast the imperatives and shifts in the new digital world. The research questionnaire and imperatives were based upon in-depth interviews and workshops with more than 40 influential global decision-makers and experts across multiple industries -- a mix of academic, industry, nonprofit, and think-tank leaders.

A push for custom software hasn't been seen since the 1990s. In recent years, IT has been focused on moving out of custom legacy software and into commercial products. The goal has been to steadily decrease costs and improve efficiencies -- and mostly by mandate from the C-Suite.

"The trouble is that efficiency doesn't represent any differentiator for the company or brand," Burton said.

And there's a bigger rub too: What good is efficiency in the old sense of the word when every industry is being disrupted and transformed now? Innovation has replaced the call for increased efficiencies, there's no doubt about that. Yet, the prevailing opinion seems to be this familiar refrain, which Burton repeated: "IT is too focused on keeping the lights on."

He added: "In the mid-1990s, IT was at the center of innovation, but in the 2000s, the crash focused everyone on automation and efficiency. IT has gotten out of the habit of innovating over the last 10 to 15 years, and it has to get back into innovation mode immediately."

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Savvy CIOs will see this as a great opportunity, and will jump at the chance to show their geek prowess once again. Indeed, there is huge opportunity here. Burton says less than 10% of companies surveyed in every industry are prepared to deliver the innovation needed. Nowhere to go but up from here, right?

How IT Can Lead Innovation

Burton said he and the EMC team gleaned many insights from the survey, and in their daily work with clients. He shared four tips, which we've paraphrased below, to help smart CIOs transform their IT organizations into places with which business colleagues want to engage:

In a nutshell: Be bold. Innovation is not a game for the timid or the imagination-challenged. Without taking wisely calculated risks, you'll never regain the respect and confidence of your top business leaders.