 How
Can IT Suppliers Reach Out to Business Executives?
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Frank Gens
Senior Vice President, Research
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| I D C O P I N I O N |
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| Line-of-business (LOB) executives
have emerged as critically important players in the IT marketplace.
LOB executives are often deeply involved in the assessment of
IT products, services, and suppliers and — in many organizations — are
among the key decision makers for IT investments. This makes
it vital that IT suppliers understand where LOB executives go
for information about IT and its impact on business. A recent
IDC survey of LOB executives revealed the following: |
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There are three predominant sources of information
influencing LOB executives' perspectives on IT usage and business
value, each of which is seen as more important than direct interaction
with IT suppliers. |
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In large organizations, the internal IT organization
is the number 1 source of information about IT and business value.
This underscores the need for IT suppliers to maintain strong
CIO relationships, even as they expand LOB relationships. |
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In small and medium-sized organizations, the
media plays the leading role among IT information providers,
in spite of the rumors of its decline. |
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LOB executives' personal business networks
are the third most common source of IT insight. Bridging into
these personal networks represents the most challenging, but
least crowded, path into the mind of the LOB executive. |
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| IT Suppliers Are Strengthening LOB
Messages |
Line-of-business
(LOB) executives have emerged as critically important players
in the IT marketplace. As we've discussed in prior Executive
Insights, the vast majority of LOB executives view IT as
integral to the development and execution of their competitive
strategies. Consequently, LOB executives are often deeply
involved in the assessment of IT products, services, and
suppliers and — in
many organizations — are among the key decision makers
for IT investments.
In response, many IT suppliers have reoriented
their offerings and go-to-market messages to go beyond the
world of their traditional customer, the CIO, and more directly
address the agenda of LOB executives. IT products and services
are increasingly developed and positioned as solutions to
specific business problems. The value of IT offerings is
increasingly described with the same business-oriented performance
metrics by which executives themselves are assessed. The
key question many IDC clients now ask is: Through what paths
can I most effectively reach these executives with business-oriented
solutions and messages? |
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| But Which Channel(s) Will Get
the Message to LOB Executives? |
In June 2004, IDC
conducted a survey of over 200 LOB executives, asking them
to identify their most valuable sources of information about
using IT to improve their businesses' competitiveness. What
the LOB executives told us, shown in Figure 1, reveals much
about how IT suppliers can channel their "business value" messages
to these executives:
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There are three predominant
sources of influence on LOB executives' views about IT usage and business value: the
media, the internal IT organization, and each executive's "word
of mouth" network of business contacts. Indeed, each of
these three exert significantly more influence than direct outreach
by IT suppliers themselves. Each of these three "channels" to
LOB executives has its own strengths and challenges, and each
is important to master in reaching out to this community. |
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The media remains a powerful
channel — in
increasingly diverse forms, including Web sites — for influencing
LOB executives' views about the uses and business value of IT.
However, it is important to note that while the media's impact
is particularly strong in the small business segment — where
access to vendors, resources for consultants, large internal
IT staffs, and custom benchmarking studies is limited — its
impact is somewhat lower in the largest organizations, which
have a richer range of information sources available to them. |
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The influence of internal
IT organizations is very strong, particularly in large organizations, where internal
IT organizations are cited as the top information source. For
large organizations, the influence of the IT organization on
LOB executives' opinions about IT and IT suppliers outstrips
that of the media by a good measure. As we noted in April's Executive
Insights, IT and Business Execs Are in Sync
About IT Suppliers: What It Means for Your Strategy (IDC #31234, April 2004), this
means that IT suppliers' outreach efforts to LOB executives cannot
come at the expense of maintaining strong relations with IT executives. |
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LOB executives' personal
networks, typically
made up of business executives of the same title across industries,
as well as executives within the executive's industry, is their
third major source of information on IT. Tapping into every executive's
PDA is not a particularly practical strategy, but there are a
number of approaches emerging for bridging into these networks.
We are seeing increased activity among IT suppliers to get close
to professional associations and industry associations, where
business executives refresh and expand their personal networks,
often seeking new ideas and best practices. (We suspect the moderate
rating of industry associations is more a critique of these groups
as direct sources of information, rather than of the networking
value they provide.) We are also seeing IT suppliers create and/or
sponsor "birds of a feather" events, targeted at local
or regional business executive communities — again, typically
around business function and/or industry issues. And, of course,
growing a strong reference base within target industries and
business functions is an extremely valuable, albeit difficult
to build and maintain, bridge into LOB communities. |
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| F I G U R E 1 |
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How Line of Business Executives Learn About
IT Impact on Business by Company SizE
Q. Where do you get the most valuable information
about using IT to improve business competitiveness?
n = 204
Note: Responses reflect percentage of respondents selecting
each option (up to three each). Totals do not add to 100%.
Source:
IDC's Line-of-Business Executive Survey, June 2004
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| Copyright 2004 IDC and reproduced with permission. |
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