Close ties between business and IT more by accident than design

Middle East IT heads work far closer with their organisation's business units than their counterparts in the US and Europe - but often it is through a culture of mistrust rather than respect. Research earlier this year by analysts Forrester, and presented during Gitex, found that of the IT heads they spoke with in the region, all said they were closely aligned with internal business units. But to an extent, this is more by accident than design.

Forrester found that IT departments in Middle East companies 'attacked' the downturn - and the subsequent cuts in technology budgets - by working more closely with business.

They said they were both enhancing the involvement of senior business personnel in IT investment governance and distributing IT resources into business areas.

The result has had a positive impact and helped with planning, said Bobby Cameron, a Vice President at Forrester who concentrates on CIO issues, even if it was not done for the same reasons as elsewhere in the world, where there is growing belief that IT and the business should work hand in hand to help move the business forwards.

'In the Middle East, IT is not as respected as in the US, so as a consequence they are already closely tied to the business,' Cameron told AMEinfo.com

But, because the two sit so closely together, when the downturn hit the region it meant that were able to work more actively together.

Like analyst company IDC, Forrester also found in its research that software as a service has yet to gain momentum in the Middle East, with under a quarter saying it was on their radar. During Gitex there have been a number of vendor announcements around SaaS, but there is general agreement that this is still a small market in the region. Where there is uptake, said Forrester, it tends to be from the local business units of multinationals.

Some vendors have taken the approach of targeting niche segments of the Middle East market. Iyad Hindiyeh, Chief Operations Officer at UAE managed services company Smartworld, commented: 'We are going after one area, which is unified communications [UC]. We see a lot of interest - people are more accepting of the idea of SaaS with UC, because it is a new concept and no one has done a lot of investment, so companies want to test it.'