Most large companies in the United States and Europe have long struggled with the need for tighter relationships between IT and business managers. This perennial management problem is echoed once again in a recent study of how French CEOs and chief information officers (CIOs) view the performance of information systems within their organizations.¹ Insights from the study suggest that CEOs are growing keener to find a solution—and that both CIOs and the leaders of business units may soon be held more accountable for business ownership of IT.

In the survey, CEOs say that IT isn’t meeting their (admittedly high) performance expectations, particularly in providing systems and tools to support managerial decision making and in gaining the scale advantages of deploying common systems and processes across business units. CEOs attribute the gap between expected and actual performance mainly to the insufficient involvement of business units in IT projects, to the weak oversight and management of these projects, and to IT’s inadequate understanding of their business requirements. As one CEO commented, "Because the business people are uninterested in information systems, the information systems people have the power."

CEOs have high expectations that business units will be strongly involved with information systems projects throughout their whole life cycle. Around 90 percent of the CEOs expect business units to identify the IT investments needed for implementing their strategies; to support, monitor, and assess important IT projects; and to help make IT-investment and budget decisions as well as the process and organizational changes that technology implementations require. But the actual involvement of business units is far below expectations: fewer than 10 percent of the CEOs feel that businesses really assess the benefits of IT projects, for example (exhibit).

Moreover, CEOs acknowledge that the governance of IT emphasizes checks and balances more than the strategic use of IT to create value. In most of the companies questioned, the business units allocate resources to information systems on a case-by-case basis, for projects often run by steering committees that oversee joint teams consisting of managers of business units and IT projects. Few business units have permanent responsibility for IT, and the interaction between CIOs and business units is often confined to a few meetings a year of a strategic IT committee. In half of the companies, the CIO isn’t involved in drawing up business-unit strategies, and in most companies information systems aren’t discussed at the board level.

But the most important blind spot is the assessment and monitoring of IT’s benefits. The survey reveals that only major projects are subjected to business-case assessments before launch, that only half of the companies monitor the expected benefits, and that the business units are not accountable for realizing them in nine companies out of ten.

The survey does, however, suggest that some CEOs are starting to make business managers more accountable for getting business value from IT. One approach is to give business units ambitious progress objectives, which encourage managers to seek ways of using information systems to meet them. A CEO said, "I try to empower the BUs [business units] and have them make commitments. We monitor them and apply pressure through benchmarks. For finance [the cost of financial processes], for example, the benchmark was set at 0.8 percent of total income and we gave them 18 months to achieve it. . . . The division bosses weren’t the least bit interested, but they realized that they couldn’t achieve their continuous-progress objectives if their division wasn’t equipped with performing information systems. In less than six months, we saw a genuine change."

Other approaches used by CEOs to get business managers more involved in IT decision making include putting information systems issues on the agendas of executive committees and initiating the development of master plans for integrating the strategies of information technology and business units.