7 ways to ensure IT gets the credit it deserves

"To give credit where credit is due." It's a wonderful thought, one that's often uttered when an enterprise achieves a significant business success or reaches an important milestone. Yet when it's time to hand out honors and awards the IT department is often forgotten, despite the fact that its leader, managers and staff provided the technologies that allowed the enterprise to reach its new plateau.
That's a shame, observes Mike Kanazawa, a strategy leader at EY Advisory, a business consulting firm. "Today, IT platforms are powering digital innovation and growth," he says. "Without giving IT the credit it deserves, companies are left underinvesting in evolving the core systems to support the speed, agility and scale to drive digital innovation." [ Learn from your peers: Check out our State of the CIO 2019 report on the challenges and concerns of CIOs today. | Find out the 7 skills of successful digital leaders and the secrets of highly innovative CIOs. | Get weekly insights by signing up for our CIO Leader newsletter. ]Failing to recognize IT's participation in critical business successes promotes the now-debunked view that IT is simply an inescapable cost center. "The CIO's job is to ensure that technology is used to generate maximum business value and will fail to do so if IT costs are viewed as overhead rather than critical business investments," explains Michael Cantor, CIO of Park Place Technologies, a data center maintenance service provider. "If a CIO wants to maximize the business value of the company, he or she must gain recognition for IT's contribution in order to obtain an appropriate share of capital dollars."