It’s been said that IT is the Rodney Dangerfield of the enterprise: IT just gets no respect. To be fair, it’s hard to get respect when you’re working with a subsistence budget and bound by rules that outside competitors, like SaaS providers, can ignore with impunity. This isn’t news. But quantifying how IT thinks it’s doing versus how the business really views IT’s performance, that’s a tougher job, one we tackled with our IT Perception Survey. By comparing 246 IT and 136 non-IT respondents, we found out where business customers are in sync with their IT teams, and where they’re not. We asked about everything from the overall importance of internal IT operations to business success to IT’s role in innovation to user satisfaction with IT projects.

Our goal was to give you insight into where business leaders sympathize, and where they don’t. After all, when business units are evaluating new applications, it’s tough to compete with SaaS vendors that will provision services within minutes of getting a signed contract–or even with a few mouse clicks. Meanwhile, IT’s still figuring out who will be on the team to evaluate the request, weigh options, choose the system that will best meet business needs, find money in the budget, and eventually integrate it into the existing infrastructure. The days of taking weeks or months to spin up a new server may be well behind us, but compared with going to a vendor website and clicking “buy,” IT still takes its time and seems slow to respond.
Network Computing