An article in the McKinsey Quarterly about the consulting firm's research on IT departments got me thinking about all those surveys where most respondents rate themselves as better than average — they think they're nicer than the average person, or more ethical, or whatever. According to one recent (and particularly preposterous) poll, about 50% of male baseball fans said they could have made the majors if only they'd had better coaching and a break or two.
What's interesting is that the IT executives surveyed by McKinsey resoundingly break that mold. In fact, they seem to have something of an inferiority complex.
With the 444 respondents split about evenly between chief information officers and chief technology officers on the one side and non-IT executives on the other, who do you think has a rosier view of IT's performance? Why, the non-techies do. More than half (55%) think their geeky colleagues are doing very well or extremely well at providing technology services. Two-thirds find the performance on high-value activities like on-time/on-budget project delivery to be at least somewhat effective.
Yet, slightly less than half of the technology execs say their infrastructure management is extremely or very effective, just 30% say the same for their IT governance, and a mere 21% are happy with their ability to target places in the organization where IT can add value.
This year's terrible economy certainly hasn't helped their egos. In six out of six categories of IT self-assessment, scores plunged compared with those tallied in McKinsey's last such survey a year ago.
Strangely enough, the gap between IT's view of itself and company leaders' view of the tech department is widest where business and IT strategy are tightly integrated and have mutual influence on one another. Only 16% of the respondents say that description applies to their companies. But among those, 66% of business leaders identify IT as performing effectively (i.e., they give ratings of extremely or very effective in at least three of the assessment categories), compared with 46% of IT leaders.
What gives? Are IT executives so driven that they rate anything less than perfection as ineffective? Are business leaders techno-ignorant to the point where they don't realize how lousy things are? Whatever the case, it would be nice if the two groups harmonized. After all, how can IT systems be expected to maximize their value if no one agrees on just how much value they provide?
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