Do IT professionals agree with IT leaders’ assessments of the direction their organisations should take in the next 12 months? What issues do each group consider to be important? Brian Runciman MBCS takes a first look at the new BCS survey for 2022: IT in the organisation.
Top lines
- Among IT leaders and managers, the top business priority for 2022 is business transformation (26%). This is followed by operational efficiencies (15%) and business continuity planning (12%).
- IT professionals (non-management) agreed that business transformation (19%) should be the main priority this year.
- When it came to prioritising technologies, 27% of IT leaders and managers chose cloud as the top priority for 2022. This is followed by cybersecurity (24%) and business process automation (19%).
- IT professionals (non-management) agreed that these should be the top three technologies priorities for 2022 but placed them in a different order. Cybersecurity is ranked first (25%) followed by business process automation (23%) and then cloud (16%).
- Only 10% of participants feel their organisation has enough resources to achieve success in 2022.
Nearly ten years ago, BCS was asking CIOs what their CEOs were asking of them and whether they thought they could deliver their organisational requirements. More recently, we have focused on IT leaders - their needs for the forthcoming year in tech and business. For 2022, we have moved in a more egalitarian direction - we have asked IT leaders and IT professionals their view of the tech, business and skills needs in their organisations.
We wanted to compare the view of IT managers / leaders with those of non-management IT professionals. In this article and the forthcoming report, we will use the shorthand of IT leaders to include those with management and budget responsibility, such as CIOs, and IT professionals as shorthand for those who are working in the profession but without management responsibilities.
Sleepless nights
Over the years, we have had interesting answers to the question ‘what keeps you up at night?’ The top three are consistent between both groups:
- Cybersecurity attacks: leaders 38%, professionals 29%
- Lack of resources: leaders 19%, professionals 16%
- The pace of change: leaders 9%, professionals 13%
For cybersecurity, the possibility of reputational damage is perhaps higher up the agenda for leaders, but it is interesting that it is those at the coalface who are marginally more concerned with the pace of change.
Top tech priorities
Leader need comment: ‘reliable operational data.’
Professional need comment: ‘Operational maturity and efficiency.’
In the full research, to be published by spring 2022, there are further details on tech priorities - including rankings in a top three. But here we are going to look at the top priority.
Previous years have consistently featured cloud and cybersecurity in the top two, with an occasional swapping of order. This year was no different for IT leaders, with cloud a priority for 27% (58% featured it in their top three) and cybersecurity for 24% (57% in top three). Business process automation was the third top priority - selected by 19% (44% put this in the top three). Whilst AI was top priority for only 10%, its increasing profile was reflected in a top three placing by 27%. And the ‘as-a-service-model’ was selected by 33% as a top three priority.
Splitting out IT professionals proved interesting: cybersecurity was the top priority (25% selected it as such, whilst 54% ranked this as a top three item) but a clear second was business process automation at 23% (47% showing in top three). Cloud was third on 16% (with 48% putting this in the top three).
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The other technology and method figures were spread more widely, but there was also a consistent showing for AI and the ‘as-a-service’ model.
The question we asked IT professionals was of course more speculative - what do they think should be prioritised? So, whilst the cybersecurity number was comparable for both cohorts, the gap in both cloud and business process automation is interesting.
Bubbling under in the comments were a few additional thoughts. One IT leader cited the more strategic ‘personalisation at scale’ as being a key priority. The IT professional comments were perhaps understandably more focused at keeping the lights on: upgrading laptops to Windows 10, improving architecture, focusing on data engineering first and data analysis second, full utilisation of Office365 and data privacy in app platforms.
Resources for 2022 success
Skills and the capability gap were key drivers for the answers in this section. Leadership team concerns figured highly too.
Leaders and professionals provided largely aligned answers. The overall numbers for additional resource needs: Enhanced IT capability and skills in existing workforce 63%; additional suitably qualified IT staff 48%. Enhanced IT capability and understanding from the leadership team at 43% only marginally pips higher budgets at 42%.
The most telling common number was those who consider they have enough resources to fulfil their organisation’s 2022 needs: only 10% of leaders agreed and only 9% of professionals.
We asked for further comments on needs and this raised some cultural issues - interestingly, these were exclusively amongst the professionals’ comments. Four key ones: ‘the need for an entrepreneurial mindset in teams’, ‘empathic management’ and, as one responder phrased it ‘a seriously inclusive culture.’ The final telling remark: ‘rather than what we can get away with, a practical implementation of care of users data.’
The capability gap
The capability gap is a complex and multi-faceted issue, so we asked for verbatim comments. We will analyse these more fully at a later date, as quantitative analysis is tricky, but here is a flavour of life at the sharp end. This is a short selection of comments from professionals:
- ‘Systemic technical risk - cross cutting risk affecting many small and large projects. These need to be addressed at the organisation level coherently and not fixed multiple times in multiple ways in an incoherent way.’
- ‘Lack of knowledge of cloud and lack of understanding of the IT estate and how it’s consumed by the business.’
- ‘DevOps has been ad-hoc and reactive; there must be investment in skills, planning, and repeatable practices.’
- ‘So-called “leaders” are being manipulated by consultants.’
A short selection of comments from leaders:
- ‘Effective technical communication across the business and with external stakeholders (translation from deep technical fields to communicable actions and customer insights).’
- ‘The usual juggle of keeping pace with technology changes and an ever more IT savvy workforce. Honestly? Objection handling and customer service skills are the biggest gap.’
- ‘Low IT literacy .’
- ‘SEO, UX and CX.’
Addressing the gaps
As a charity focused on education, BCS is always interested in how organisations plan to address these, the following chart shows answers from leaders.
Source: BCS IT in your organisation report 2022
The full report covers these areas in more detail, with additional sections on business priorities, IT project failure, IT representation at board level and a further selection of responder comments.
