The Disconnect
The IT Analyst plays an invaluable roll in ensuring IT business initiatives are on-course and completed within the given pre-defined parameters. There is an apparent gap in understanding between many IT professionals and Business leaders, simply because the experience and objectives of both parties are so vastly different. Gartner conducted a survey in 2012 with 220 CEO’s around the world regarding the role of a CIO in the organization. Mark Raskino, a VP at Gartner told us “the results showed CIOs were rarely seen as the masters of innovation management within the company by the CEO, nor were they thought of as strategy partners.” This is difficult to stomach when businesses foresee increasing their IT budgets over the coming year. Mark continued on why CIO’s aren’t considered as imperative to the core function of business: “CIOs appear to be failing in the eyes of CEOs in terms of alignment with the rest of the business. The research showed the stereotype of the head of IT being too preoccupied with technical issues to be effective business leaders persists. He said they were perceived as unable to bring a breadth of business perspective to the table.”
Seeing this issue is interesting and shows a place where IT analysts really need to be strategically positioned within an organization to climb corporate ladders to the CIO role, or equivalent. Executive level officers(read CIOs) need to be more concerned with the bottom line, and less concerned with the finer details of how technologies are executed. Because Analysts are concerned with both aspects of business and technology, their skillset is perfectly aligned to work towards to this role.
Sources| http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/careers/cios-dismissed-as-techies-without-business-savvy-by-ceos-3351675/