BACK TO SECTION 5
Section 6: Information Technology
The final topical section of the survey focuses on technology. Questions focus broadly on management of information technology functions and likelihood of outsourcing those functions in the future. Question 24 asks about company policy regarding the Internet. Responses appear in Figure 17.
Note once again that there are no significant differences between 2007 and 2008.
A majority of respondents (63.6%) report that their organization has a formal policy to guide use of the Internet at work. About one-third (33.5%) have a way to monitor the amount of time employees spend on the Internet, and about 16% have a policy concerning blogs authored by employees. Larger companies are significantly more likely than smaller companies to answer "yes" to each of the three questions. It is unclear whether lack of perceived need or high associated costs or some other reason is responsible for the low percentage of companies engaging in the latter two practices.
The next question asks about information system security, productivity, and evaluation. Results appear in Figure 18.
Mean responses indicate weak to moderate agreement with each of the statements. Executives appear to have more confidence in their organizations’ information technology protocols than in their personal abilities to evaluate the competence of information technology managers or the productivity of information technology staff. Again, these agreement levels are similar to those expressed last year to these same questions, and again, it seems that executives are not particularly confident in their abilities to monitor this important function.
Levels of agreement appear to be similar across organization size, sales level and location. In addition, levels of agreement do not vary by education level of the executive.
The final question in this section asks about the likelihood of outsourcing a variety of information technology functions within the next year and a half. Figure 19 presents summary responses to this question.
"Production/maintenance of company Web site" and "server maintenance" are the only two information technology functions which have mean likelihood ratings above the scale midpoint. Four functions, "technology support desk," "client databases management," "financial systems management," and "customer service call center," have means significantly below the scale midpoint. The remaining functions are clustered around the midpoint.
However, if we look at disaggregated data, a slightly different picture appears. Most of these items have bimodal distributions in which respondents tend to answer at one end of the scale or the other (with relatively few answering near the mean). Thus, sizable minorities indicate strong likelihoods (a "6" or a "7" on the scale) for outsourcing many of these functions. Specifically, more than 30% of our respondents indicate a strong likelihood of outsourcing "production/maintenance of company Web site," "installation/setup of computer workstations," "HR/payroll systems management," "server maintenance," "security systems," and "computer programming."
