Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the results of a survey that shows that innovation focusing on information and KPIs drives substantial positive business results.

1. Survey Says: Investing in IT Distinguishes Industry Leaders
from Industry Laggards
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the results of a survey that shows that
innovation focusing on information and KPIs drives substantial positive business results.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: HP.
Dana Gardner: Hi. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today we present a sponsored podcast discussion on some fascinating new findings from a recent
survey on CIO priorities. We'll uncover what distinguishes leaders from
laggards among CIOs and identify which IT approaches and solutions are
driving the most powerful business results these days.
To help dig into the survey, explain what it means, and learn how these results
can lead to establishing winning new IT strategies we're joined by our guests,
Joel Dobbs, President and CEO of Compass Talent Management Group. He's
also an Executive in Residence at the School of Business at the University of
Alabama, Birmingham, and a lead blogger and member of the Enterprise CIO Forum.
What’s more, Joel is a retired CIO himself, coming from such organizations as GlaxoWellcome,
Schering-Plough, and Eisai. Welcome to our discussion, Joel.
Joel Dobbs: Thank you very much.
Gardner: We're also here with Daniel Dorr, a Worldwide Solutions Manager for HP Enterprise
Marketing. Welcome to you, Daniel.
Daniel Dorr: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: Let’s start with just an overview of what we wanted to accomplish. Daniel, what was
the idea behind doing this survey at this time?
Dorr: Dana, a lot of companies talk about how important technology is and we all represent our
technology as the right answer to the problem. But if our job is to help our CIO
clients better use technology to solve business results, and if our job is to help our
CIOs work more effectively with their executive committees and CEOs, the best
way for us to help them is to determine which technology actually changes or is
correlated with in-market results.
In other words, if we look at revenue leaders in-market, which technology seems
to be most closely associated with those who lead in-market performance? It's not

2. technology for technology’s sake, or because it’s exciting or new, but technology that actually
seems to represent business results.
So our goal here was to help our clients do a better job of assessing which technologies lead to
in-market business results and which technologies might not.
Gardner: Well, this has been a hot topic for decades, trying to establish the link between
technology practices and business results.
Joel, you've been in the trenches as a CIO. You're now involved with the academic view of this
and doing some talent work. When you reviewed these results, was there anything that jumped
out, that was perhaps something new or interesting from the tried-and-true approach to linking
IT and business?
Not much separation
Dobbs: There were a couple of things that surprised me, one of which is how close statistically
the leaders and laggards were in some areas. There was not as much separation in
some of the areas that were looked at as I would have expected.
The other thing that surprised me is one of the areas that gets an awful lot of play
in the press now -- this whole idea of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies
for employees. For the most part, this seemed to have been a non-issue for most
of these folks. This suggests that either this has not taken hold as much as we
would be led to believe or that companies have just basically decided they're not
going to tackle this battle now and will save that for another day.
Gardner: Tell us a little bit, Daniel, about this survey. When did it happen? Who was targeted?
HP was involved. Maybe you can tell us how, and then who conducted it? Let’s just get the brass
tacks on how this came about.
Dorr: We wanted to understand the difference between market leaders, from a revenue
perspective, and market laggards or followers and see what their IT environments looked like.
We surveyed 688 organizations. We spoke to IT decision makers, so we would call that "CIO
minus one." We didn’t speak to the CIO directly. We spoke to the people that reported to him or
her.
Everyone that we spoke to had to have significant knowledge about applications, information,
data center operation, security, and cloud. The survey was conducted over nine different
geographies: the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, UK, Germany, France, Japan, China, Australia, and
covered a number of different industry groups.
This was not a public survey. In other words, the people responding didn't know the survey was
coming from HP. It was a blind survey. We asked over 55 different questions around areas of

3. application, security, information, cloud, etc. to understand which attributes were most strongly
correlated with in-market or revenue performance, and those that weren't.
The questions we were trying to answer were what do market leaders do versus followers? How
do industry leaders differ from followers? Is there a difference depending on the region or the
market or the industry? And where do IT decision makers focus on a day-to-day level, versus the
more CIO strategic forward two-year thinking level?
Gardner: Just to be clear, the surveys were delivered and answered in the last few months of
2011. Is that right?
Dorr: Exactly right. The results came into us in December 2011. So this is pretty accurate and
up-to-date data.
Gardner: How about some of the top findings? Were there some nuts and bolts issues here
around workload, automation, server capacity, things like that, that we could look to and just get
a sense of who these organizations are and where they are on their journey towards a better IT
outcome?
In search of priorities
Dorr: We asked over 50 questions to understand from organizations where their priorities were
and what they were doing today and then we compared that to their in-market performance. And
I would say the answers fell into three buckets. They were around infrastructure
issues, information and information management, and people and processes.
On the infrastructure side of the equation, we asked a number of questions,
but the ones that rose to the top in terms of driving in-market or correlation
between revenue performance were probably three or four. A lot of it had to
do with application modernization and security, when it came to the
infrastructure side of the equation.
For example, market leaders tended to have fewer custom applications and fewer legacy
applications. They tended to use their server capacity more efficiently than their peers. Those
were some of the big ones around the infrastructure side of equation.
With security, which we talked about briefly, the market leaders tended to build security, not only
into the boundary, but also into the applications themselves, versus the market followers tended
to focus on an us-versus-them mentality, or just boundary security.
… Companies that manage risk more effectively and more automated definitely outperformed
their peers. As a technology company, we're always looking at the infrastructure. We're always
talking about how infrastructure can lead to competitive advantage, and we saw that, but a lot of
times we forget the people and process side of the equation.

4. One of the other areas that jumped out at me was the need for clarity and agreement of key
performance indicators (KPIs). Market-leading companies who outperform in revenue over their
peers had more clarity within IT about which KPIs were important and had agreement on those
KPIs. Everyone is marching and working toward the same goals. That had a huge impact on me
as well.
It’s not just about infrastructure. It’s not just about managing risk. It’s also the people/process
side of the equation that is critical in market-leading companies.
Gardner: Joel, when you hear that those who are doing well seem to have fewer custom apps,
fewer legacy apps, higher utilization rates on their servers, what does that tell you about these
types of organizations?
Dobbs: It tells me a couple of things. We'll start with the second one, server utilization. What I
think you're seeing there is the affected people who have really done a good job with
virtualization. You're not having is a lot of equipment sitting around idle or used at under
capacity. So I suspect virtualization probably plays into that difference significantly for a number
of people.
Custom and legacy applications was something I hadn't really thought about until I read this
material. I suspect that what you're seeing is probably a result of modernization of applications
that I call commodity applications, things like human resources, some of the financial
applications, a lot of things that are generic across businesses. You're probably seeing some of
the leaders move to more software-as-a-service (SaaS) type applications in order to free up their
staff to work on things that are much more strategic to their business.
Unique value
So the things that they're working on are probably things that are adding unique value to their
business, and they're not spending a lot of cycles doing things with generic applications that they
can buy and let somebody else manage.
The security thing bears out what we were talking about a few minutes ago. If you're just doing
security on the boundaries, that's a cheap way to do security, if you think about it. You put a
firewall in place, you configure the thing, and you do the boundary security stuff. But when
you're building another layer of security into your applications, that tells me that there's a lot
more focus on the realization of the value of what's in there, in terms of the data and the way that
it’s used.
There's very much an intentional focus on protecting not only the perimeter of the institution, but
making sure that there's added security and protection within the perimeter. I would expect that
folks who are really serious about understanding the value of the information within those
systems and the risk to their corporate reputation, should those be compromised, are being very
intentional about mitigating those risks.

5. Gardner: So it's a strategic comprehensive approach to security across the assets, including the
applications.
Daniel, before we move on, a question on the infrastructure. When I saw this, I said that sounds
like services orientation -- modernized apps, fewer monolithic stacks, higher utilization vis-à-vis
virtualization. Was there anything else that would back up my hunch that services orientation
was also prominent in the way they are doing infrastructure?
Dorr: You're absolutely right, but the key component here is actually using it for the right
purposes. Virtualization was one of the questions, but you'll notice virtualization, in and of itself,
did not rise to the surface of market leaders versus followers.
It wasn't just that you're moving to a service-oriented view, but you're actually implementing it in
a way that means something to the business. You're actually seeing a change in capacity usage.
You're actually seeing a change in custom and legacy applications.
Again, not following that shiny object, but it's implementing it in a way that's strategic to the
business, is what we are seeing here. It's not just virtualization, but it's using virtualization to its
full capacity.
Dobbs: I agree completely.
Gardner: So we have talked a little bit about infrastructure. What were some of the other major
areas, Daniel?
Dorr: The second big area was around information. There was a huge difference around the area
of audit and compliance. For example, we saw that more than half of the market leaders had
automated their audit and compliance, about 52 percent. Market followers tended to be much
less. Around 39 percent had automated their audit and compliance.
Information strategy
There was an information strategy in place in both market leaders and market followers.
However, market leaders tended to have automated their information-management strategy,
versus followers, who just had it documented.
Also, we see a big difference in the use of business intelligence (BI) to automate decision
making. About 18 percent of market leaders are automating their decision making using BI tools,
while only 7 percent, so less than half of them, less than half of them as leaders, are doing that.
Now, there is still a huge amount of room for growth on both leaders and followers there, but to
see only 18 percent rise to the surface already tells you the importance of automating BI decision
making as a clear difference for market leadership.

6. Gardner: Let's go back to Joel on those two items. This gets to a point that I'm really interested
in, a movement in business nowadays to much more of a data-driven and analysis-driven
decision process. Perhaps the older way might be summed up by the highest paid person's
opinion being the way that ultimately decisions were made.
But Joel, how do you react to some of this issue around information management and BI?
Dobbs: There are a couple of things here. One is that there's been an interesting evolution over
the last 20 years in this field. We started out in IT automating various business processes. The
focus was on making those processes faster or more efficient or something of that sort. As a
result of that, we were generating information that had valuable use, but really wasn't being used
that much.
It was during the reengineering revolution in the early '90s that people began to look at that.
Along with the uptake of Six Sigma and Lean Sigma, people began looking at harvesting that
data that was collected almost as a byproduct of automation and using it for continuous
improvement and various other things.
This whole field has matured. Take the example of just the retail industry and all the information
that’s collected as a result of point-of-sale processing and things like that. What we've learned is
that that’s a rich trove of information that can be mined and used for all kind of things.
What you're seeing with the leaders is that they not only understand it, but they're doing it. That’s
a big differentiator between those who understand it and have the insight and the capabilities to
take this information and look at it in different ways. I suspect some of the automating of
business, the BI automation, as we were talking about, is really a way of going back and using
technology to create options for decision making, based on automated looks at data.
Let's talk about the automation of, I think the term you used, Daniel, was the automation of their
information strategy, versus documentation. What that tells me is one group is doing it and the
other group is just writing it down, and that’s a big difference. It’s like the difference between
what most people do with strategy. Most people develop a strategy and there comes nice a book
that sits on a shelf somewhere, and very little gets done about it.
The ones who are really leaders are the people who develop a strategy and then part of that
strategy is a strategy to implement the strategy. That’s what this automation that you saw among
the leaders really reflects -- not just talking about it, but actually doing it.
Single view
Gardner: Yeah, it strikes me too that this gets back to that theme that we raised earlier about
being controlled and being comprehensive as an IT organization. You can’t gain that single view
of the customer and you can’t gain insight across an entire business process, purchasing, supply
chain, the relationship between cost and outcomes, without that ability to gather all the different
bits and pieces and then manage that in some way.

7. So it strikes me, again, as an indicator of maturity and comprehensive control vis-à-vis IT and
makes them therefore more powerful when it comes to this level of insight. Daniel, what other
areas were part of the top findings, and where can we go now to the next stage, which would
perhaps a little bit better define what distinguishes leaders?
Dorr: Just to close on that information discussion, I agree completely with Joel’s points. If you
think about it, there were seven key attributes that rose to the surface for market leaders, revenue
leaders, and revenue followers.
Three of those were around information. Automating your audit and compliance, having an
automated information strategy. In other words, as Joel said, doing it, versus just writing it down,
and really using BI for decision making. Three out of seven are around information. So clearly
this is a key theme for in-market performance.
One of the things we do at HP is workshops for CIOs to help align business and IT and identify
the impact that IT can have on the business. This comes up every single workshop we do.
We did it with a retailer recently. It took them days to process in-store information, in order to
know what SKUs were selling and how well marketing programs were doing. By the time they
had that information, it was too late for them to do anything.
They couldn’t change the SKUs on shelf. They couldn’t update, migrate, manage, or move the
marketing program into new regions or what have you. As a result, their performance in-market
clearly showed the difference. They were at a 20 percent disadvantage to the revenue leader in
their category.
So I don’t think we can understate the importance of helping the business see what’s happening
and understand what’s happening through automating audit and compliance, through actually
implementing the information management strategy and trying to automate as much as possible
decision making using BI.
Dobbs: I would echo that and add one thing. Daniel pointed out that there is increasingly a
competitive advantage. The competitive advantage becomes not just doing it, but doing it faster
than your competitors and being able to understand the meaning and the application of the data
ahead of your competitor.
The retail example is a great one, where you're lagging days behind in your ability to harvest and
use the information. Increasingly, the competitive advantage becomes being able to make
adjustments and move much more quickly, whether it’s deciding where to place inventory or
how much inventory you need to keep on hand, and all those kind of things. Time is money, and
being able to move quickly can be a huge advantage.

8. What about cloud?
Gardner: We haven’t talked too much about cloud, and this did come up as one item that
distinguishes leaders over laggards. Perhaps we could address that. Daniel, what is it about cloud
that popped out in this survey?
Dorr: The focus of the survey was what capabilities clients have today and how that correlates to
their revenue performance. We didn’t see a lot of cloud attributes rising to the service in people’s
current capabilities. We did, however, see it rising to the surface in the focus area, where we
asked IT decision makers, the CIO minus one, what was important to them. We did see a pretty
significant difference between what market leaders, revenue leaders, thought was important
about cloud versus market followers.
In fact, almost half of revenue leaders see cloud as incredibly important to them versus their
peers, almost half of that number in the market followers. So, we're seeing a lot more priority
focus on cloud computing going forward.
We didn’t see it driving current revenue performance, which makes sense. Cloud is somewhat of
a new technology. We haven’t seen it fully deployed in many cases in driving today’s revenue.
Gardner: For the benefit of our listeners, Daniel, maybe we could just go through the list at a
prioritized basis, with descending priority, on what distinguished the leaders over the laggards. I
think the top one is security as we mentioned, but let’s just go through it on a list basis, so they
can get a sense of the importance.
Dorr: Sure. Of the 50 attributes that we asked our CIO minus one IT decision makers and
directors, what was happening within their IT environment, seven of those attributes rose to the
surface, and they fell into three buckets, as we talked about briefly before. One was around the
infrastructure side of the equation or the core computing environment, one was around
information, and then the final one was around people and processes.
… With the survey, once we identified which specific attributes differentiated market leaders and
market laggards or market followers from a revenue perspective, we then put it on a maturity
score and we would score them based on those key attributes. You can see a clear difference
between those with obviously a higher score, a higher maturity in their IT environment, around
those key specific areas and their in-market performance.
Specific areas
So from the infrastructure side, it was custom applications and legacy applications. Leaders had
fewer custom applications -- 38 percent versus the followers at 45 percent.
Leaders had fewer legacy applications -- 25 percent versus followers at 32 percent.

9. Leaders used their server capacity more efficiently. They used about 80 percent of their server
capacity at peak usage, versus followers using only 71 percent.
Leaders had security built into the applications as well as at the boundary, versus only a
boundary-level security, inside/outside view of the world.
In the information area, leaders automated audit and compliance at an average of about 52
percent versus followers at 39 percent.
Leaders had automated their information strategy, versus followers only documenting their
information strategy.
Leaders tended to use more BI and automated decision making versus followers. So 18 percent
of leaders had automated business decision making using BI, versus followers at only 7 percent.
Then there is the people and processes side -- and this is an area where CIOs can actually start
working on right now without spending a cent -- which was clarity and agreement of KPIs. We
saw a big difference in market leaders. There was a high degree of clarity within their
organizations about what the KPIs were and agreement on those KPIs, versus only a moderate
level of agreement within market followers.
That’s an area where CIOs can take action today. They don’t even have to talk to a vendor or an
analyst at all. They can walk right into the CEO’s office and start working on that problem today.
Gardner: Let’s move to a separate lens to view this through. One of the things you asked was a
series of questions that led to some conclusions about what distinguishes those who do best, and
what leaders were focused more on. You broke it out into five different areas and you got some
indicators of why it’s important, leaders versus laggards. Perhaps you could run through those as
well.
Dorr: At the end of the survey, we asked them areas of importance, and we gave them security,
information and insight, infrastructure convergence, application transformation, and cloud
computing. We asked them to rank which were the most important to them. And we asked them
to rank their current capabilities.
This was different from the attributes. For example, most of our IT decision makers ranked
security, defined as keeping the lights on, as the number one priority. When they ranked their
current capability, again, they ranked their current capabilities quite high, doing that well today.
Although leaders tended to feel they were doing a better job of keeping the lights on, versus
revenue followers.
Number two on the list was information and insight, in terms of driving what is important today
from an IT organization. Again, the average of how important it is was not significantly different
between leaders and followers. What was significantly different was how well they rated
themselves.

10. We saw this in the individual attributes, but also when they ranked it at the end as well. Leaders
tended to outperform, or believe they were doing a better job managing information and insight,
than their followers by almost twice as much.
No huge difference
There were no huge differences on converged infrastructure or applications between leaders and
followers, but the area where we saw a big difference was in cloud computing. Leaders ranked it
much higher in importance and believed their current capabilities are much higher than their
industry peers.
Gardner: Joel, let's go back to something you mentioned earlier. You were a little bit surprised
that the difference on some of these areas between the leaders and the laggards was smaller --
there wasn’t a great deal of difference. Which of those were you referring to and what does that
tell us about a baseline of IT functionality that everyone has, but it doesn’t really distinguish
anyone either?
Dobbs: Some of the things really surprised me, security actually. The magnitude of that
difference was somewhat surprising. Things like the infrastructure convergence were actually
fairly close. I expected a little bit more of a spread there.
Around information and insight, there's a pretty good difference. It's statistically significant
because of the size. In many ways I would have expected that spread to be even larger, because
so many laggard companies are really just operationally focused, keeping the lights on, etc.
I was even surprised that you had that large of a percentage that rated themselves very capable. I
would have expected it to be lower than that. In some ways, I would have expected more of the
leaders to have considered themselves very capable. So that was a little bit lower than I would
have expected.
For cloud computing, the capabilities are probably not that surprising but, again, the spread was a
little less than I would have expected. Because it's a new technology, one would expect that the
leading companies would have been much more further out front, beginning to look at ways of
exploring the capability there.
But you had only about 36 percent versus 20 percent. It's statistically significant, but was
somewhat surprising to me that the gap was not even larger than that.
If you look back at how they ranked cloud computing by importance, it's the same sort of thing, I
would have expected a higher percentage to have been looking, if that's something that’s
potentially very important, particularly at some of the capabilities that are available today in
SaaS. It's a way of getting away from having to maintain rudimentary legacy systems that really
don’t add a lot of business value.

11. Gardner: Let's slice and dice this a different way. Daniel, what about regional differences, or
similarities, but let's start with differences? What were some of the biggest differences by region
that jumped out at you? Then, maybe we could ask Joel to tell us what he thinks that means in
terms of the progression of these technologies and maturity models around the globe.
Dorr: We didn’t see a huge difference in the regions, particularly the U.S., Latin America, or
Asia Pacific and Japan. In those regions we saw a little bit in terms of platforms -- Windows
versus Linux, virtualization, and so forth -- but not huge issues. It was more kind of personal
preferences.
Mainframe in Europe
The one that did jump out at us though was Europe. The biggest difference in Europe is that
there is actually a growing movement around the mainframe. At the global level, we saw the
mainframe was irrelevant to market leaders versus market followers.
In other words, some market leaders were moving more towards the mainframe, some market
followers were moving more towards the mainframe. Some market leaders were moving off of
the mainframe and some market followers were doing the same. So there was no correlation
between a mainframe strategy and in-market performance anywhere, except in Europe.
In Europe, we saw that market leaders were those that were moving and growing their
mainframe strategy, versus market followers who were just maintaining their current mainframe
strategy.
Gardner: What does that tell you, Joel? What is it about Europe that has them so interested in
mainframes or perhaps that leads them to be successful?
Dobbs: That’s a very good question. That’s actually a surprising finding. Having worked in
Europe for a number of years earlier in my career, there are two things that I suspect that might
be factors, and these are generalizations. So I don’t know if they're applicable in all cases.
What you see a lot of times in European companies is a much more conservative approach to a
lot of things in business, and IT is certainly one of those. So change doesn't always come as
rapidly in some of those cultures as one would see in cultures with a higher risk tolerance, like
you may see in U.S. and other areas. That may be one thing.
The other thing I would wonder about is the extent to which the economic environment there
may have an impact on this. You're seeing growth in the mainframe sector, largely because
companies may be avoiding expensive investments in other technologies and simply expanding
upon what they already have. There are a lot of implications, not only in terms of software and
licensing and a number of other things, in being moved to another platform.

12. So I wonder if the economic environment there has been a factor as well. It's hard to say, but
that’s interesting and somewhat perplexing finding.
Gardner: It makes sense that they are maintaining their current systems rather than growing and
modernizing.
How about vertical industries, Daniel, anything that jumps out there in terms of which vertical
industries that you examined and broke out in your survey seemed to be doing well, and for what
reasons?
Vertical industries
Dorr: We looked at retail, communication service providers or telco, manufacturing, energy,
healthcare, and banking. The results were comparable to what we saw in each of the regions with
what we saw at a global level.
We saw a couple of differences in each of the industries. In retail, for example, when it came to
their information strategy, a new aspect was how they managed both structured and unstructured
data, versus only structured information.
This makes sense, if you think about it from a retail perspective. There is a lot of qualitative
information coming in for leaders to understand, not just that the inventories are up or down or
sales are up or down, but to understand why. So that was a big one that’s different from a retail
perspective.
In communication service providers, no big differences there between what was happening at the
global level versus the retail level.
In manufacturing, we saw a little difference in terms of external IT spend on new applications. In
this case, leaders were spending less on new applications than followers.
In the energy sector, there were no significant differences there, or in healthcare. In banking, the
one biggest one was cloud capabilities. We did see a lot more interest in cloud in banking than
we saw in some of the other areas. Otherwise, it was very similar to what we saw at the global
level.
Gardner: So we've got some interesting takeaways here about the role of modernizing, gaining
visibility, measuring along the way, being comprehensive in how IT approaches these problems,
being responsive to the business on the business terms rather than the technology terms, with an
emphasis on culture as well and the people and the process. We've talked about this at a high
level.
Daniel, for those folks who are intrigued and would like to get some of these statistics and
findings themselves, do you have a place they can go to learn more to either perhaps see a slide
deck, a white paper? What’s available for them?

13. Dorr: A couple of places. First of all, you can join us at the HP Discover 2012 event in Las
Vegas in June. We'll be presenting these results there and sharing it with attendees there. In
addition, they will be posted on hp.com.
Gardner: Great. Joel, what takeaways do you have from this in terms of whether people should
readjust their thinking or perhaps take a pause and ask what they can be doing different when
they sort of tease out some of the findings here?
Impact of investments
Dobbs: There was an interesting study published by MIT just a month or so ago that looked at a
number of companies. What they found is that some of these companies that were investing
heavily in IT, the IT investments actually had a greater impact on profitability than the same
amount of money invested in research and development or in advertising. That’s a shocking
finding.
I think what happens, when you delve underneath these companies who get such great returns on
IT, you find two or three different things that are embodied in what we saw in some of the
leaders here.
One of them is really good governance around decision making. The second thing is probably
ownership of IT by the entire executive team. And I think the third thing is that they're probably
measuring their return using business metrics on the investments that they make.
That’s what differentiates the leaders from the laggards -- they're approaching IT holistically as a
core part of their business strategy, instead of seeing it as a support function or a back-office
function.
And things like this study that we've just been talking about today, as well as the MIT study, help
add credence to the idea that money is well invested in IT, and I emphasize well-invested. It can
have a tremendous payback, but only if you use it wisely.
Gardner: And that sort of runs counter to the perception of IT as a cost center, rather than as an
enabler for growth and opportunity.
Dobbs: Precisely.
Gardner: Okay. Daniel, last word to you, are there takeaways or areas that we may not have
covered that you think we should also uncover here?
Dorr: Joel said it very eloquently. There is a large body of research. Now, we have HP's own
research. We have the MIT study, showing that there is a clear correlation between technology
and in-market revenue results. As CIOs, we should feel confident to walk into the CEO’s office
and talk to them about the strategic benefits that we can offer the organization.

14. The two biggest areas that we should be having conversations with our business counterparts
today are clearly around information and KPIs. If we have agreement on those, we've covered
more than half of the key attributes that we see between market leaders and market followers.
So there's a lot of opportunity for us in IT to start playing an even bigger leadership role in
helping our companies innovate and drive in-market results. I look forward to seeing what the
results look like two years from now, once we see cloud and other things deployed and driving
even bigger benefits.
Gardner: As you point out, there's a lot more room for growth around those BI and analytics
benefits. They're already sort of showing a great deal of worth even though we are still early into
it.
You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on some new findings
from a recent survey on priorities for IT organizations and what distinguishes leaders and
laggards in the field based on their business outcome.
I'd like to thank our guests. We've been joined by Joel Dobbs, President and CEO of Compass
Talent Management Group, as well as Executive in Residence at the School of Business at the
University of Alabama, Birmingham. He is also a lead blogger and a member of the Enterprise
CIO Forum.
And we've also been joined by Daniel Dorr, Worldwide Solutions Manager for HP Enterprise
Marketing. Thanks to you both.
Dobbs: Thank you.
Dorr: Thank you.
Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks also to you for
listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: HP.
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the results of a survey that shows that
innovation focusing on information and KPIs drives substantial positive business results.
Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.
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