Enterprise boards are lacking IT involvement

CIO's need, but do not have, a space on enterprise boards

Progress Software has released research that suggests that senior IT managers in the UK are much less involved in the running of the business than their European counterparts.

The research, launched earlier this week, found that just 48 per cent of UK chief information officers took a place on the board of their company, while in France, for example 69 per cent do.

Progress said that this meant that IT managers came late into decision making processes, often when the major decisions had already been made. It found that in just 13 per cent of cases IT were involved in deciding on business strategies, while more often, 35 per cent of the time, they were asked to deliver on an already decided plan.

Giles Nelson, director of technology at Progress, said, "Innovation is a process where IT and business need to collaborate but, with less than half of UK companies having a CIO on the board, they're making these decisions blindly… leaving those that best understand technology's potential out of the decision making process."

More findings from the research suggest that an information gap exists in business, meaning that real-time data is often not available to those that could benefit from it. Seventy seven percent of respondents said that they needed such data, but only 39 per cent said that it was available to them.