UK CIOs tied up by inflexible ICT

As 2010 draws to a close and 2011 demands ever greater results from CIOs, top ICT professionals in the UK say their IT systems are too inflexible to respond to ever changing demands.

According to a study of 220 CIOs by Accenture 90% of UK CIOs feel their systems are not flexible when information needs change, compared to 67% in the rest of the world.

UK CIOs find themselves having to spend less time on discretionary IT activities, but still trying to create more value from it. Meanwhile Tthe percentage of time spent on non-discretionary application and infrastructure activities has fallen from 43% in 2008 to 37% in 2010,

UK CIOs also feel they are technology laggards compared to their foreign counterparts. In other countries, some 92% and 83% of high performers have deployed or are piloting service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management while only 45% of UK organisations can say the same.

For information-related technologies, 92% and 77% of high performers have deployed or are piloting data quality assurance and master data management (MDM), respectively, compared to 73% and 45% of UK organisations.

"Our survey found that CIOs at high-performance IT organisations are deeply involved in business outcomes and closely attuned to current and future business needs across the enterprise," said Gary Curtis, Accenture's chief technology strategist. "They are successfully retiring their legacy systems and embracing newer technologies. They are adept at managing the balance between optimising costs and ensuring that they have the budget, skills and resources to help fuel business growth."

The one area in which CIOs in the UK do seem to have a head start is in Cloud adoption with 55% saying they have deployed or are piloting software-as-a-service compared to 31% of other nationalities. A further 27% of UK CIOs say they are deploying or piloting infrastructure-as-a-service, compared to just 16% of their peers.