The pivotal position of the CIO in IT infrastructure

Competition has forced organisations to focus their attention on key success factors. To be effective, these must be adopted and nurtured at all organisational levels. Increasingly, the ability to compete is less dependent upon productive scale or technological advantage. Instead, more emphasis is being placed on customer service, quality and productivity improvement for continued prosperity. Achieving these objectives necessitates supplanting hierarchical and functional interests and committing to the sharing of improvements and information. This investigation extends the current emphasis on organisational success factors to their application and impact on Information Technology (IT) management. Success and satisfaction data were obtained from 379 organisations. These were compared for shared commitment and translation down and across the levels of the organisation. The focus of comparisons is the pivotal position of the Chief Information Officer (CIO). The conflict of roles in business strategy policy and managing IT infrastructure is examined. Significant differences were found between the views of top management and CIOs on the importance of the assessment components. These differences become compounded and exaggerated at successive organisational levels. Major differences were found between IT personnel and user groups. Several issues critical to end-users are given low priority by IT personnel. However, the primary differences are between top management and the CIO. Structural changes in the leadership of IT are required to realise business objectives through IT.