Diagnosing your information needs.

• Position: From FEI

A new Financial Executives Research Foundation study, Competency Assessment: A Tool for Creating Business Value Through IT, and its accompanying IT Tool Packet, will be published this month as a follow-up to FERF's 1992 study, Managing IT for Success: The Empowering Business Partnership. V. Sambamurthy and Robert W. Zmud, both of Florida State University in Tallahassee, co-authored both studies.

The major component of the new study is an assessment tool, which is a questionnaire designed to measure 29 areas of information-technology management competence in seven categories: business deployment, external networks, line-technology leadership, process adaptiveness, IT planning, IT infrastructure and data-center utility. The study contains background information and guidelines on filling out the questionnaire and analyzing and interpreting the results properly.

While developing the questionnaire, Zmud and Sambamurthy conducted four focus groups to get feedback on the accuracy and the usefulness of the questions. After refining the tool further, they tested it on a multinational pharmaceutical company, a large petrochemical company and a medium-sized public utility. They found one common area of miscommunication was the need to disseminate the company's vision of information management's role in the organization. Often, the information-services group placed a high priority on this task and believed it had done a good job of explaining the importance of IT, while the corporate group didn't assign it nearly the same importance. Still, the corporate groups in all three companies were surprised to find, by answering several questions, that they hadn't successfully communicated the value of information management.

Zmud and Sambamurthy also found companies' goals and commitment to meeting them often don't mesh. "Organizations say they'd like to develop competency in a certain area, such as project management, but then they don't rate it as important in their goals," Zmud explains. Why the discrepancy? In one company faced with this situation, "The information services group didn't have formal procedures for project management, but they all implicitly felt they were good project managers." Of course, this is a subjective measure, he adds, and once the group discussed its results, it realized it needed to collect some data and start analyzing project-management performance in a more objective, concrete fashion.

The tool also helped the utility...