THE TOP IT CONCERNS FOR CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICERS IN EUROPEAN ELECTRIC POWER INDUSTRIES

摘要

The electric power industry heavily depends on IT. Earlier, business operations of most large companies were supported by a number of isolated software systems performing diverse specific tasks, from real-time process control to administrative functions. Today many companies possess a highly complex enterprise-wide IT system; in large organizations several hundreds of interconnected systems may be employed. The industry is challenged by two major changes; the integration of administrative systems and operation support systems and the deregulation of the electricity market. The deregulation affects the deployment of IT in many ways; new IT support is needed for many business processes, e.g. billing. The ever changing business environment challenges contemporary organizations to constantly get most value from their IT. The Chief Information Officer, CIO, is responsible for IT management which is a significant challenge today. This paper uses the Architecture Theory Diagram (ATD) for modeling the CIO's responsibilities. The ATD spans the concerns of the CIO and is based on consolidated knowledge from existing architecture theories and frameworks. This paper presents the result from a survey where the concerns stated in the ATD were prioritized by CIOs at European electric power industries. The result can be used by CIOs for benchmarking. A prioritized set of concerns can be used for communicating to the rest of the organization what is important and be used as a basis for IT investments decisions and determining strategy. This paper is based on a survey answered by CIOs in the European electric power industry in January and February 2005. The survey was answered by twelve supreme IT chiefs at Electric Power Industries in Europe. All the respondents come from different countries and ten of the respondents are members in Cigre. The respondents consist of 75% CIOs and 59% of all the respondents' reports directly to their CEO. Results from the survey indicates that "Developing strategies", "IT and business alignment", and "Information security" are the three most important concerns for the European CIOs' in general. Then it is a large gap down to the fourth most important concern, which is "Project management". The paper is concluded with recommendation on how companies can use this survey to focus and communicating their prioritizations. The survey has been conducted in cooperation with the CIO-group at Vattenfall, Cigre and the Department of Industrial Information and Control Systems (ICS) at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden.