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Section 6: Technology
The final topical section of the survey addresses the issue of technology. Questions focus broadly on management of information technology and likelihood of outsourcing specific IT functions in the future. Question 14 asks about company policy regarding the Internet. Responses appear in Figure 11.
Note there are no statistically significant differences between 2008 and 2009. However, there is a clear and steady upward trend in the prevalence of each of these Internet policies.
Two-thirds of respondents (66.9 percent) report that their organizations have a formal policy to guide use of the Internet at work. Just over one-third (36.9 percent) have a way to monitor the amount of time employees spend on the Internet, and approximately one-fifth (21.6 percent) 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 a lack of perceived need, high associated costs, or some other reason is responsible for the lower percentage of companies engaging in the latter two practices.
The next question asks about information system security, productivity, and evaluation; results appear in Figure 12.
There have been no changes on the ratings of these statements between 2008 and 2009. Mean responses indicate weak to moderate agreement with each of them. Executives appear to have more confidence in their organization’s IT security protocols than in their personal ability to evaluate the competence of IT managers or the productivity of IT staff. Again, it seems that executives are not particularly confident in their ability to monitor this important function.
Respondents from larger organizations seem to have more confidence in their IT security protocols than do respondents from smaller organizations. For the first time, we are beginning to see a slight relationship between respondent age and two of these statements: those under 50 years old express slightly more agreement that they are able to: 1) monitor productivity of their IT staff; and 2) evaluate the competence of their IT leader or CTO.
The final question in this section asks about the likelihood of outsourcing a variety of specific information technology functions within the next year and a half. Figure 13 presents summary responses to this question.
“Production/maintenance of company Web site” and “server maintenance” are the only two IT functions which have mean likelihood ratings above the scale midpoint. Five functions—“installation/setup of computer workstations,” “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.
As was the case in 2008, 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, 25 percent or more of our respondents indicate a strong likelihood of outsourcing “server maintenance” (43.7 percent), “production/maintenance of company Web Site” (43.2 percent), “HR/payroll systems management” (39.5 percent), “security systems” (35.2 percent), “computer programming” (34.3 percent), and “installation/setup of computer workstations” (28.8 percent).
Smaller organizations are generally slightly more likely to plan to outsource these functions than are larger organizations. The only exception are customer service call centers, in which case large and small firms are equally unlikely to have outsourcing plans. There is also some evidence that more highly educated respondents are slightly less likely to plan to outsource these IT functions.
