BANGALORE, INDIA: Recently completed research from Unisys Corporation, involving 1,200 organisations worldwide, shows significant gaps between executives' business and IT goals and their estimation of their organisations ability to achieve those objectives.

Those gaps indicate that executives are not getting the most from their business initiatives and information technology (IT) investments and need new approaches to modernise their business processes, strategic applications and IT infrastructure to address their core business challenges.

To help executives close those critical gaps, Unisys announced the Unisys Modernisation Benchmark service. Using trend information from the Unisys research, this service helps organisations benchmark their current business and IT operations against those of their peers and competitors, exposing the gaps between their desired state and their current readiness to achieve it.

This enables executives to focus on those gaps which are likeliest to have a major impact and identify the business and technology initiatives in which they must invest – and the ways they must manage those investments – to gain the greatest business advantage in the shortest timeframe.

Dominick Cavuoto, vice president, Global Industries and Worldwide Strategic Services, Unisys, said, "Too many IT executives are in a budgetary straitjacket imposed by constricted notions of how IT can support business. They're spending 80 percent of their IT budget on infrastructure maintenance and funding innovation only as an afterthought. These strictures have been imposed largely by outmoded views of IT as a cost centre, not an investment. The Unisys Modernization Benchmark service helps executives find fresh ways of thinking so they can free IT to enable breakthrough performance gains with low-cost operating models that deliver maximum return on investment."

Research reveals fissures between aspiration and execution

The double-blind Unisys study, which provides baseline information for the Unisys Modernization Benchmark, surveyed 1,200 business and IT executives in organisations worldwide.

When asked to state their most important business objectives, the respondents to the Unisys study uniformly placed priority on customer-focused and customer-dependent goals, such as acquiring new customers, building closer relationships with existing customers, developing new products and services, growing sales and revenue and reaching new markets.

Those executive respondents identified 10 capabilities – nearly all dealing with information and IT investments – which they believed were critical to achieving those business objectives. The capabilities included ability to support innovation, IT management practices, strategic decision-making, and approach to IT investment, communications (information flow within and between organizations), IT sourcing model and IT security model.

Each executive was asked to rate where their organisation stands today in capability to execute in each area and where they expect the organisation to be in the next three years. In each case executive ratings indicated a significant gap between their current readiness and expected performance. For example:

62 percent of respondents expect that they will encourage innovation or be market leaders at supporting it within three years. Yet 70 percent say that currently they have no support for innovation, or their capability is only evolving or moderate;

In describing IT management practises, 52 percent of respondents expect to treat IT as an investment or differentiator in three years, yet 72 percent say that they currently treat it as a support function, a means to enhance productivity or a capital expense;

67 percent of respondents expect to have integrated, collaborative communications with critical stakeholders within three years, yet only 32 percent say they have such a capability now;

While only 51 percent of respondents have a formal, mature IT sourcing strategy and model today, 75 percent expect to have one in three years;

60 percent of respondents currently rate their security model as non-existent, limited or moderate, yet 75 percent expect their security model to be state-of-the-art in three years.