Most large companies in the United States and Europe have long struggled with the need for tighter relationships between IT and business managers. This perennial management problem is echoed once again in a recent study of how French CEOs and chief information officers (CIOs) view the performance of information systems within their organizations.1 Insights from the study suggest that CEOs are growing keener to find a solution—and that both CIOs and the leaders of business units may soon be held more accountable for business ownership of IT.
In the survey, CEOs say that IT isn’t meeting their (admittedly high) performance expectations, particularly in providing systems and tools to support managerial decision making and in gaining the scale advantages of deploying common systems and processes across business units. CEOs attribute the gap between expected and actual performance mainly to the insufficient involvement of business units in IT projects, to the weak oversight and management of these projects, and to IT’s inadequate understanding of their business requirements. As one CEO commented, "Because the business people are uninterested in information systems, the information systems people have the power."
CEOs have high expectations that business units will be strongly involved with information...