Thursday, 15 November 2007

Business-IT Alignment CIO Top Concern

Business-IT alignment is the greatest challenge Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are struggling with today, according to survey results from the CIO Roundtable Seminar. The seminar, which was jointly organized by Compuware and academic...

Business-IT alignment is the greatest challenge Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are struggling with today, according to survey results from the CIO Roundtable Seminar.

The seminar, which was jointly organized by Compuware and academic institution INSEAD was held in August 2007 and addressed the topic “Driving the Value of IT into Businesses”. During the session, other issues were also brought to light including talent attraction and development and inclusion of the CIO in strategy making.

The objectives of the seminar were to examine the evolution of the CIO’s role and explore how IT can deliver strategic value to businesses. Over 30 top-notch IT honchos from the public sector and private industries including financial services, media services, education and engineering participated in this event, contributing valuable inputs during the roundtable discussion.

“Increasingly, IT is becoming a critical tool in driving innovation and competitive advantage in organizations and as shown from our survey findings during the CIO Roundtable Seminar, business-IT alignment is the foremost concern of most top C-level technology executives. To address this issue, CIOs must work collaboratively with the business to establish, identify and understand strategic goals and elicit effective business requirements in order to develop high-impact IT applications and processes, put IT Governance Framework in place to prioritize IT spent that creates business value and provide a business oriented view of how IT Services are performing in support of critical business processes,” said Sachin Khanna, Managing Director for Asia South, Compuware Corporation.

Other key survey findings from the seminar also revealed the critical initiatives that the CIOs will be embarking upon in the next twelve months. The most prevalent initiative that emerged was the alignment of IT to business requirements. Other remaining projects include business continuity management application performance management, information management and project and portfolio management.