Chief information officers (CIOs) are facing a dilemma when it comes to IT investment ­ torn between pleasing customers and impressing investors.

With consumer adoption of advanced technology at an all-time high, customers and staff expect businesses to provide the same experience in the workplace that they receive at home. But organisations are failing to deliver because investment decisions are focusing on analyst share guidance instead, according to the annual global CIO survey from Accenture.

IT departments spend 40 per cent of their time running and fixing existing technology, rather than developing state-of-the-art systems, though more than 60 per cent of equipment is fully depreciated.

Only 15 per cent of IT platforms worldwide are customer-focused, and four out of five companies gather insufficient information on consumer’s preferences.

“CIOs have been relying on investor approval to make decisions and therefore falling behind consumer-led technology,” said Tim Murfet, head of Accenture’s enterprise architecture practice.

“Decision-makers need to start looking at what the consumer wants, instead of investing in short-term initiatives to just keep the show on the road and impress shareholders,” he said.

“There are a lot of products and services that could be hugely successful if businesses start analysing their customers’ needs.”

Though challenging, it is possible to create applications that make financial savings as well as benefiting the customer.

British Airways (BA) cites its BA.com upgrade as central to its return to financial health after a slump in the late 1990s. Today, some 95 per cent of the airline’s customers use e-tickets and more than half check in using self-service systems.

“Investment in customer-facing technology is a catalyst for improving our core processes, which helps the entire airline to cut costs while providing the customers with more choice and control,” said head of IT and
business change John Mornement.

BA continues to increase technology investment year on year, while reducing the overall IT spend via consolidation, simplification and using open source products where it is appropriate.

But the adoption of consumer-led technologies does not come without risks.

Half of respondents to a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit and KPMG said security concerns were inhibiting the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis and blogs in their company.

“Businesses have to either engineer solutions that bypass the need for reporting structures or figure out how to set up these systems securely,” said Phillip Virgo, strategic adviser for the Institute for the Management of Information Systems.

“If the implementation of a new customer-facing system is going to represent extra expense as opposed to savings then it should not be done, however fashionable it is.”