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A culture of IT elitism in client company technology departments is to blame for senior managers taking business decisions on a whim. A study of over 1,000 business managers found 85 per cent resort to ‘blind decisions’ every day, leading to irreversible mistakes. ICS, the firm behind the findings, said the cumulative cost each year of managers’ inept decisions and subsequent errors is at least £8billion. All tiers of managers say the main culprit is the IT department withholding data relevant to decisions pertinent to the wider business operation. Most managers blamed IT teams for creating a type of “information bottleneck” that relegates their judgment calls to be based on out-of-date information. Such an “enormous information gap” is hampering managers in UK organisations and is straining relations between management and frontline IT staff. Researchers at Independent Computer Systems added that the underlining cause of IT teams ‘withholding’ data was a lack of resources to report it. Managers criticised the tendency for business analysts within the company to be the exclusive holders of data, rather than it being available for those who need it day-to-day. Seven out of ten decision-makers complain that the right information is never at hand to inform the decisions they have to take. The consensus among all levels of managers, especially junior to mid level, is a sense of regret that dependency on IT support needs to be so high, in order to take effective decisions. Even when the relevant information circulates outside IT departments, most managers feel it could be more up-to-date, with even more complaining it is too static and should be ‘interactive’. Despite the high technological expectations, fewer than 10 per cent admit to having the technical skills to create their own reports, even though most expect it would help their decision-making process. "UK profits are suffering death by a thousand cuts," said Christian Smyth, managing director of ICS, referring to monthly losses of over £600m for UK organisations carrying inept managers. “British managers are blinkered with out-of-date and inadequate information. They are forced to make daily decisions blind, with the resulting blunders costing millions each day. This is quite literally commercial suicide - the wounds are self-inflicted, and, more to the point, avoidable.” ICS, which is primarily a vendor of IT products, has provided a number of best practice solutions for effective use of Business Intelligence, designed to put managers in touch with critical information. But the firm’s findings are not isolated. A recent nCircle/You Gov poll recently found IT teams are failing to communicate with managers, leaving a third of mid-level managers clueless as to whether systems were hacked in 2005. Supporting both industry reports, Peter Cochrane, former chief technology officer at BT, last month told Contractor UK that managers overseeing IT departments guess their way through key business decisions. “People in UK corporations often make decisions on the basis of no evidence, frequently they are making guesses. The management is ineffective rather than ‘stupid,’ in other words, management controlling IT departments are not doing it intelligently,” he said. A copy of the ICS report, ‘Information Black Hole 2006’ with recommendations on how to improve business intelligence and keep managers more informed can be requested from http://www.RSinteract.com. May 5, 2006 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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