Forrester

Why Read This Report

More so in 2007 than in recent years, IT departments and their business partners in North America and Europe are generally in sync on strategic priorities. From our survey of more than 500 IT executives on both sides of the Atlantic, we found that the critical business priorities were improving the customer experience and operational excellence and supporting regulatory compliance. These are largely consistent with the critical IT priorities of getting apps projects done on time and on budget, supporting regulatory requirements, and reducing the costs of IT. Furthermore, the perception of IT has improved because of better execution by IT on the basics of IT operations and better communication between IT and the business. From a structural perspective, we found that greater size leads to greater decentralization. However strategic groups like planning and vendor management are used to coordinate between these distributed groups. Finally, standardization of IT remains strong, particularly with infrastructure. However, we expect little change in the level of standardization over the next two years other than an increase in business and IT process standardization.