In Pursuit of High Performance: Defining High-performance Information Technology

In surveys across a spectrum of business categories, Accenture researchers found increasing evidence that a policy of high-level integration of the information technology functions across an enterprise is becoming a crucial contributor to achieving high performance.

Listen to Lyle Ginsburg, managing director for technology and innovation: Accenture, reporting on the research and exploring how IT contributes to high performance.

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With IT a critical factor in any enterprise, Accenture set out to research how high performers use IT in a bid to understand the capabilities that underlie high performance.

The research covered two related aspects: the broadening perspective of companies specializing in IT services, and the increasingly integrated and innovative role that the IT function plays within high-performance businesses of all types.

Accenture's survey of high performance in IT was conducted in 2006, based on a quantitative survey with 255 telephonic respondents and a qualitative in-depth series of interviews with 22 CIO-level executives. Respondents were drawn from the automotive, consumer, retailing, industrial equipment, transportation and travel, pharmaceutical and health care industries. Geographic regions covered were the United States, Europe and Asia Pacific.

There was broad consensus that IT should be viewed as a strategic investment, with the IT team seeking to drive value creation, while making the enterprise more cost-efficient through consolidation and integration.

Accenture found a strong link between high performance in IT and a business's achievement of high performance:

• Chief executives increasingly include high-performance IT among their strategic imperatives.
• The IT budget is seen as an opportunity to invest in innovation, rather than simply allocating spend.
• IT executives tend to base strategic decisions on what is good for the whole business rather than simply on what is good for IT.
• The majority of IT executives (87 percent) believe that IT adds an important strategic capability, rather than merely being a support function.

As the strategic importance of IT grows, so will the need to monitor its contribution with metrics set to receive investment in the future.

With the function of IT advancing from business support to business driver, corporate willingness to spend on IT as an investment with business-building potential is set to grow.

Clearly IT is assuming a more strategic position for high-performance businesses, with the survey revealing that 74 percent of respondents to the Accenture survey anticipate that IT investments will become high corporate priorities.

In a further indicator of how seriously the role of IT is seen, the survey showed that IT organizations that achieve high performance in this category are more likely to use key performance metrics to align IT's work with the strategic goals of the business. Mastering metrics that matter means moving outside the four walls of IT so that IT executives can communicate with business colleagues about operational priorities and enterprisewide initiatives.

Accenture's survey identified five defining activities that mark the IT organizations of high performers.

In light of the strategic value of IT and the new demands that companies are likely to make on IT suppliers, what kind of IT partners should high performance companies be looking for? Accenture identified the following five defining activities:

• Measuring performance against broad business goals: Use of key performance metrics to align IT's work with the broader business.
• Investing in innovative technologies that create new value: Early adoption of leading-edge technologies.
• Leveraging information for insight: Management of information for real-time insights and strong analytic capabilities.
• Reducing enterprise costs through cost-efficient operation: For example, high-performance IT organizations drive Web-enablement and achieve significantly higher online utilization levels.
• Enabling the enterprise through integration: Championing enterprise integration today, with a strong interest in the potential of service-oriented architecture.