IT Systems’ Effectiveness Decreasing, Survey Says

Frustrated by the information technology department at your company? It might be some consolation to know that chief technology officers share the feeling.

More than seven out of 10 CTOs surveyed for Computer Sciences Corp.’s annual “Critical Issues of Information Systems Management” study said their top concern is getting their IT organizations in line with their companies’ business strategies.

In addition, almost 66% of the 594 survey respondents said technology users would probably rank the overall effectiveness of their IT systems as “average” or “acceptable” rather than “good” or “excellent.” Last year, 55% of those surveyed said their systems were “average” or “acceptable.”

“This shows that from the IT executives’ perspective, things are not improving but are getting worse,” said Van Honeycutt, president and chief executive of El Segundo-based CSC, which specializes in information systems.

And they may get worse still. The survey found that only 16% of companies have deployed year 2000 solutions, and 21% are only now assessing the problem. The remaining 63% of companies are in the process of fixing the so-called millennium bug.