Modesty Ruins IT Managers' Careers

A recent research showed that IT managers are too shy to deal with self-promotion, which is really bad both for their departments in particular and for the IT sector on the whole. Two-third of 200 IT managers, who took part in the poll, which was conducted by Deloitte & Touche and IDG Research Services, acknowledged that they had absolutely no ability to advertise themselves.

As they said, the majority of IT managers were not able to make their bosses realize the importance of their work. However, IT managers are certain that they fulfil their duties properly. Ninety percent of respondents said that information technologies either played the key role, or were extremely important for successful activities of their companies.

Dean Nelson, the chief of the integration and development department at Deloitte & Touche, said that the opinion poll revealed an interesting dilemma: IT directors and other leading IT managers experience the growing pressure on the part of their administration that wish to see the real effect from their investments in the IT field. However, managers find it rather difficult to give a proper evaluation of their work and to inform their bosses about that.

Either IT managers are bad at communication, or it is really hard to calculate the gains of investments in the sphere of information technologies, but a lot of businessmen perceive the IT as a hopeless way to invest money in - that's a fact. Probably, the recession in the IT-sector was caused with the lack of clarity, although the sector returned the profit of more than one trillion dollars at the end of the 1990s, during the sales boom.

Specialists say that the volume of investments in the IT-sector will be the same as it was last year, since companies still have a serious approach to the issue of purchasing high-tech production. Yet, the last year was called the worst one in the history of the IT industry.

As the research showed, a lot of IT departments experience the lack of correctly determined activity priorities. Many of respondents said that the budgets of their departments in the current year were uniformly distributed between the spending on software and information security means. In other words, analysts believe that no priority is given to any directions of activity.

Furthermore, 84 percent of respondents (IT directors and top IT managers) said that they did not make IT-related key decisions at their companies. Specialists came to conclusion that IT-managers had been deprived of the privileges that they had during the high-tech boom era.