Influential it Management Trends: An International Study

Abstract

This paper is based on data collected as part of an 11-year authors’ survey research on IT trends in different geographic regions, including North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and Latin America. This study focuses on global similarities and differences in technology trends (e.g., management concerns, influential technologies, budgets/spending, organizational considerations) among geographies to gain insight into the challenges that IT and non-IT executives face today as well as provide an understanding of the impact these technologies have on the organization's long-term plans and investments. The results for the 11-year period show that the top five management concerns are: (i) IT-business alignment; (ii) business agility; (iii) business cost reduction/controls; (iv) business productivity; and (v) security/privacy. The five most influential technologies are: (i) analytics/business intelligence; (ii) cloud computing; (iii) ERP systems; (iv) CRM systems; and (v) security technologies. Taken together, these findings suggest that the alignment of IT and the business and leveraging IT to reduce business expenses and generate revenue are and will remain essential. The results also suggest that the role of the CIO is evolving and offshore outsourcing is on the rise. Budgets, hiring, and salaries are also increasing, albeit cautiously. This research provides important implications for IT managers to benchmark considerations such as organizational, sourcing, spending, issues/concerns, and technologies across geographies, and sheds light on a perspective on leveraging important IT trends to make thoughtful decisions about them over the coming years, and address current business challenges.

A Quality-Driven Methodology for Information Systems Integration

“…IS integration emerged from the domains of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) [2], [6]. Since the turn of the 21st century, it has been consistently ranked amongst the top application and technology areas in terms of importance for investment [2].…”

“…Since the turn of the 21st century, it has been consistently ranked amongst the top application and technology areas in terms of importance for investment [2]. However, the term grew to embody areas that are usually considered distinct as far as IT management is concerned [7], [8].…”

“…Integration projects commonly include elements from such diverse, loosely-related domains as distributed systems, databases, enterprise architecture, middleware, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Process Management (BPM), and cloud computing. Several of the domains are themselves top ranking application and technology investment areas [2]; which indicates that in practice the importance of systems integration is even higher.…”

“…Some organizations even decide to skip IS integrating altogether during mergers, often because the technological perspective is overlooked [11]. Top IT management concerns include business-IT alignment, enterprise architecture, and change management, among others [2]. Yet, IS integration is not viewed as a top concern, despite its close relationship to the other members of the list.…”

“…lacking a common language for effective communication which would be essential for developing a community with shared values [1]. An IS integration community can facilitate the exchange of ideas across otherwise unrelated domains, which can ultimately lead to better research and actual improvements in business-IT alignment-which is consistently viewed as the top management concern [2].…”