The message that organisations need to align their IT operations much more closely to the business appears to have finally sunk in, according to research published this week.

Recruitment firm Harvey Nash’s 2007 Strategic Leadership Survey – a CIO Perspective, says most chief information officers (CIOs) are now operating at a strategic level and playing a much more active role in the running of the business.

Some 76 per cent of 519 CIOs surveyed said their role has become more strategic, compared with 67 per cent last year.

And IT heads are keen to gain responsibility and widen their remit away from the IT department. Harvey Nash found that two-thirds have already expanded their job scope, and the third who have not would like to.

While this is clearly encouraging news, there is a problem. The gap that once existed between the business and the IT department may have been reduced, but a new one has appeared between CIOs and their teams.

Less than a fifth of CIOs have confidence in their team’s ability to develop relationships with the business, which has fallen from a quarter last year.

The IT department is still very much a technical operation, with emphasis on the practicalities of bits and bytes rather than business efficiency.

Encouraging one person to be more focused on business operations and strategic benefits is one thing, but changing the mindset of a whole department is a completely different kettle of fish.

If this issue is not addressed, businesses could find themselves coming unstuck at the implementation level. Failure of IT projects is often blamed on cultural resistance, and this survey suggests this phenomenon is alive and well and living uncomfortably close to home.

Much of the expertise CIOs are applying in project management and alignment with the business must be applied to all members of their own team to ensure cultural change also occurs in IT departments.