Anticipating continued economic uncertainty, more boards of directors are saying that they expect a “high” to “extremely high” strategic contribution from IT in 2012. The Gartner Forbes 2011 U.S. Board of Directors Survey found that these expectations have more than doubled, from 32 percent of survey respondents for 2010 to 66 percent for 2012.

Gartner and Forbes surveyed 96 company directors from October to December 2010. The survey was designed to gain insight from a group that has low visibility to IT and business leaders, yet is ultimately held accountable for the performance of the corporation. The survey examined the key business issues and priorities of a sample of directors from companies with revenues over $1 billion — their view of what is ahead for their businesses and their expectations for IT’s strategic contribution to the business.

“The pursuit of higher impact for IT in an environment of budget constraint is one that insists on rewriting the rules for how IT acts,” said Jorge Lopez, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “There are two dimensions: IT productivity, where the internal operations and structure of IT itself are restructured to perform at a cost vastly different from the competition, and the entrepreneurial CIO scenario, where the IT organization takes a leadership position to rewrite the rules of competition for the industry. To meet the expectations that have risen will require rethinking about how IT operates.”

Stay Focused

While 73 percent of board directors surveyed believe that the economic situation is tough and will remain so for the foreseeable future, 51 percent said they are still focused on growing revenue. The tension between these two views means that CIOs will need to plan for the systems that will be required for growth but build in flexibility should circumstances change amid high levels of uncertainty.

“FusionStorm’s cloud-based solutions are ideal in this context,” said Vince Conroy, CTO, FusionStorm. “IT Xpress Cloud, for example, provides convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of resources that can be rapidly provisioned, creating operational, cost and energy efficiency without the need to invest in additional technology, people and expertise. It combines the reliability, performance and scalability of FusionStorm’s enterprise-class data center infrastructure with the flexibility and economics of cloud computing.”

Customers can also benefit from cost savings and reduced complexity by deploying network-based, business-critical applications, services or websites using FusionStorm’s IT Xpress Managed Hosting services. In addition, FusionStorm’s MS Xpress Remote Managed Services solves the IT support puzzle with 24x7 remote monitoring, management and problem resolution for critical systems. By transferring responsibility to FusionStorm’s experienced team, organizations can stay focused on core competencies rather than maintaining the IT environment.

Bottom Line Is Top Priority

One of the goals of the Gartner Forbes survey was to test how board directors view the different business issues in front of them. The hypothesis was that board-level issues, such as corporate governance, would rank highly, along with the issue of corporate social responsibility, such as workforce diversity, instituting green policies and philanthropic activity.

However, in listing the top 28 priorities, survey respondents ranked issues that have a direct connection to revenue and profit highest. Issues that concern the board directly, such as instituting or strengthening corporate governance, and issues of social responsibility and political lobbying fell lower in priority.

“The prevailing sentiment is one of focus: Pare away all that is not central to the business you are in,” Lopez said. “The recession has already pared away a substantial amount of extraneous effort across the entire business for most industries, and there is work remaining in federal, state and local governments. The moves will be to reduce the efforts of the business that are off the main strategy, and IT should be no different.”

“All of our managed and cloud-based services offerings have one thing in common — they allow organizations to focus on business-critical activities rather than on deploying, monitoring and supporting the IT infrastructure,” said Conroy. “IT organizations faced with twin mandates to rein in costs while delivering more strategic services to the enterprise can see real, bottom-line benefits from transferring operational and maintenance functions to the dedicated professionals at FusionStorm.”