Business and IT: lost in translation?

One in four companies in the Asia-Pacific region do not formally measure the performance of their IT operations, underscoring the gap between business and IT, a new study found.

In addition, two in three companies do not measure business-relevant service level agreements, keeping management in the dark about IT's true contribution to the business. Sponsored by BMC Software, the study was conducted by Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and polled more than 400 senior business and IT executives in the region.

Because of the general disconnect between business and IT, 84 percent of those surveyed said IT could contribute to their companies more than it presently does.

However, for IT to add more business value, management of routine IT tasks must be standardized and centralized, BMC said in a statement Tuesday.

"Currently, this job is done poorly, with survey results showing a spectrum of deficiencies in standardized procedures for recording IT-related incidents; the ability to identify IT infrastructure components and link them to specific business services; and the ability to produce quickly an accurate report of IT assets," the business management software company said.

The survey also found that 44 percent of respondents have no clue about the relationship between IT components and specific business services, and only 47 percent of organizations have a standard way of reporting incidents. Some 41 percent of them cannot accurately report their company's IT assets.

Tom Schodorf, vice president at BMC Software Asia-Pacific, said the results indicate that IT's contribution is still off the mark in many organizations.

"IT needs to get fitter if it is to perform at the speed of business," Schodorf said in a statement. "IT managers must be able to respond from a business, rather than a technology, point of view. You simply can't do that without standardization."

Nonetheless, there are some bright spots in the survey findings. About 66 percent of senior executives said IT is able to support new business initiatives, while 70 percent of them noted that IT has been successfully used to improve business processes over the past five years.

Tim Sheedy, senior analyst at Forrester Asia-Pacific, noted that IT is more integral to the business than any other segment in an organization.

Sheedy said during a Compuware IT conference Wednesday: "If you turn off the finance systems, your business will probably shut down after a couple of months. If you turn off HR (human resources) in some companies, the business impact may be negligible.

"But if you turn off IT, your business will stop immediately," he said.

"However, our challenge is in measuring and improving IT for business," he added. "It's about switching things around, such that instead of aligning IT to the business, [it's about] businesses actually aligning themselves to IT."

Sheedy noted that while IT has helped to automate business processes such as HR and manufacturing with ERP (enterprise resource planning) software, the same cannot be said for IT itself.

"We haven't automated our own shop," he said, urging organizations to make use of automation tools to aggregate business demands, which can be met if IT assets are better tracked.

Furthermore, if IT is provided as a service within organizations, Sheedy said "we also need people to make sure the business is getting the benefits they need".

"Otherwise there'll be a big gap in what you're providing and what [business users] are actually consuming," he added.