Samspel mellan IT-avdelningen och affärsverksamheten : En studie av attityder

Sammanfattning: IT has become more evident in most organisations and has grown to be a part of the infrastructure rather than a tool for competitiveness. Therefore focus should now lie on how IT is adjusted to the business rather than on the usage of IT. To make the best use of IT in the business the CIO needs to start think more business-oriented instead of as before, technology-oriented. To develop the IT-department in that direction the IT-staff need to start cooperate with the business and gain knowledge about stakeholders, markets and the way of working for other staff members in the business. With this as a basis, the purpose of this thesis is to investigate attitudes regarding cooperation between the IT-department and the business and if there is any difference if the CIO has business related background or not. To fulfil the purpose a quantitative investigation with the help of surveys was conducted. The sample consisted of 18 companies with 100-200 employees in the area of Jönköping. The survey was sent to the CEO as a representative of the business and the CIO as a representative of the IT-department. The result shows that 89 percent of the respondents have a business related background which implies that most companies have moved from being technology oriented to being more business oriented. Furthermore, almost all respondents, irrespective of background, believe that a business oriented background is required to understand the business better. From a general point of view the result shows that the background of the CIO does not have a significant importance on the cooperation between the IT-department and the business. This could be a result caused by the few respondents with a technology oriented background. Furthermore the result shows that there are differences in the opinion between the CIO and the CEO. However, these opinions do not point in a specific direction meaning that there are no indications that a certain group of respondents consider the cooperation to work better or worse than the other. Differences of opinion exist concerning communication and the IT-departments knowledge about the way of working in the business while the opinions are similar concerning user influence, integration of IT-strategy an business plan and the way of working in the IT-department. An astounding result is that 22 percent of the CEO’s does not know that their CIO has a business related background.