DECEMBER 15, 2015 — ARLINGTON, MASSACHUSETTS

According to Dennis Adams who has analyzed Cutter's IT budgeting survey for the past 10 years, IT managers believe that senior corporate-level managers and senior business unit–level managers regard IT as a partner. But he identifies an area for concern "in the steady difference over time between what senior executives and business unit executives see as the value of IT. In each survey, the manager of a business unit, presumably that leader closer to the customer (or to the product) than the senior executive to which he or she reports, appears to be slightly less satisfied with the value that IT delivers. This could mean either that service levels to business units are below expectations, or that service levels to the senior executives in the organization are higher, or both. We would hope that the level of satisfaction for both groups would be roughly equal, or that those closer to the problems in need of a solution are actually more satisfied."

Adams recommends that "Ideally, the wise manager would like to ask his or her non-IT manager counterparts this question directly. It would be in the very best interests of each of our reader's organizations to conduct such research on a regular basis. A wise manager knows that the best way to make IT a full, respected member of the executive team is to seek ways to deliver more and more value to its customers proactively. The old adage that "no news is good news" does not work in the 21st century when individual managers can procure their own IT services using cloud resources and thus cause compliance and interoperability problems. Some IT leaders regularly use internal resources to gather this sort of important data and periodically use consultants to dig a bit deeper to make sure they are not missing anything when looking at service levels."

* Excerpted from "IT Budgets: A Decade of Data," () Cutter Benchmark Review Vol. 15, No. 2