IT Investment: Performance and Priorities in South East Asia's Major Economies

In line with their new responsibilities, chief information officers need to establish long-term road maps for improving capabilities within their departments.

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This is the first of a new wave of Accenture research using an updated diagnostic tool.

Since 2004, Accenture has been studying performance drivers in managing and executing information technology—a discipline that its High Performance Business research has identified as a key characteristic of high performance.

This Accenture study, IT Investment: Performance and Priorities in South East Asia's Major Economies, delivers the first set of updated findings from 48 South East Asian chief information officers and chief technology officers from across many industries. These industries include telecommunications, capital markets, government, automotive, transportation and travel, banking, chemical, health care, energy, mining, utilities, electronics, consumer goods, pharmaceutical and retail. The data is from mid-2006 and includes specific conclusions for the economies of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

This survey examined how South East Asian companies are managing their information technology investments and processes across five fundamental function capabilities:

Innovation: Investment in innovation must be linked to business objectives

• Fifty-four percent of chief information officers said they wanted to be an early adopter or lead the market with IT innovation.
  
  
• Online utilization in transaction processing in southeast Asia is strong with CIOs indicating that 68 percent of potential employee interactions are already online.

Industrialised IT Delivery: Operational delivery still lacking in South East Asia

• Only 36 percent of IT application management time is spent on running or fixing existing applications.
  
  
• Application management operational delivery has a significant gap between current performance and best practice and errors are still the cause of most unplanned trouble-shooting. CIOs need to use external providers especially for specialized skills.

IT Applications and Integration: South East Asian companies are slow to take advantage of new IT enabled business processes

• South East Asian companies are behind the curve in terms of service-oriented architecture implementation.

Infrastructure: Operational improvement is dominating over "on demand" computing and agile infrastructures

• Managing infrastructure takes up 38 percent of the total IT function time.
  
  
• Today's infrastructure agenda in South East Asia is dominated by operational improvements aimed at improving service management; reducing systems complexity; and standardizing and consolidating servers, desktops, messaging and wide area networks.
  
  
• Standardizing and consolidating storage has already largely been accomplished, and remains a priority for only one third of respondents.

Information Management: Executives and employees need more timely and detailed access to business critical information

• The volume of information is exploding, but business-critical access to timely and detailed financial, operating, customer and supplier information is still lacking across most organizations.
  
  
• Less than 50 percent of organizations had access to highly granular customer, product, internal process, supplier or pricing data.
  
  
• Less than 50 percent of organizations rated as "good" their access to important management information.

Chief information officers have been given more responsibility in organizational decision-making.

In fact, more than 50 percent of respondents claim that they have been given more responsibility and involvement in overall business decision-making in the past one to two years. In parallel, many respondents have been empowered to achieve higher levels of IT investment in their organizations. All of this attests to the growing recognition of information technology's role in increasing the profitability of the business. In line with this, more than 50 percent of chief information officers now report directly to the chief executive.

Chief information officers are thus being given more control of their information technology budgets.

To fulfill their mandates and drive the organization toward high performance, chief information officers must establish long-term road maps for improving organizational information technology capabilities across the five broad areas of functionality.

Accenture suggests that chief information officers start planning their journey with the help of the following checklist:

• Innovation: Managing a pipeline of new technologies that can be applied to high-impact customer-relevant processes.
  
  
• Industrialization: Instilling manufacturing disciplines in planning, designing, delivering and managing information technology.
  
  
• Integration: Leveraging standards-based services-oriented architecture and linking processes, technology and people to enable fundamentally new business processes.
  
  
• Infrastructure: Delivering secure, reliable solutions and predictive performance monitoring.
  
  
• Information: Enabling fact-based decision-making and actions.