As information technology moves into the business mainstream and becomes increasingly critical to the performance and competitive edge of companies, the role of the information technology (IT) director or chief information officer (CIO) is changing dramatically.
Research undertaken by International Data Corporation on behalf of Korn Ferry International and the Financial Times among IT directors in the US, UK, Germany and France confirms that fundamental changes are under way in the role of IT directors and CIOs in all four countries.
The study, based on interviews with 340 CIOs 150 in the US, 70 in the UK, 70 in Germany and 50 in France, also highlights the differences between IT directors in the four nations, including in their backgrounds, career prospects, perceptions of future technology and the amount of time they spend talking to other key business executives.
But it also contains a number of surprises: for example, 15 per cent of US CIOs and 10 per cent of those in the UK admit to "never interacting" with their chief executive.
Similarly, expertise in Internet technologies emerges as top of the list of skills CIOs believe will be most important to them in the US and ranks a close second to network computing in Germany and France, but in the UK, expertise in Microsoft's Windows NT tops the list.
The survey also provides an interesting insight into who IT directors are, where they came from, what motivates them and how they measure success.
Strikingly, more than a fifth of all US CIOs consider that existing IT investments have failed to generate a genuinely good return on investment to their organisation and a further quarter were only mildly convinced it had.
Predictably, cost-reduction remains the biggest selling point for new IT investments. There is, however, evidence of growing disenchantment with IT outsourcing, particularly in the US, the most mature outsourcing market, where 67 per cent of respondents said outsourcing had failed to generate the cost savings expected compared with 47 per cent holding this view in the UK.
However, the survey also shows that IT professionals recognise that it is crucially important to align the IT infrastructure to business processes and to use IT as a strategic tool to improve competitiveness.