A delicate balance? Harvey Nash publish the results of the 2019 Technology Survey

A leadership crisis? Technology leaders take note - less than one in five of your team feel you are ‘very effective’ at creating a vision and strategy for your organisation, and a worrying one in three feel you are ‘ineffective’. 

Fractures in the tech team? Regardless of seniority, the roles that are most likely to be positive about leadership are customer oriented, digital roles. It hints at an emerging ‘dividing line’ in the tech team between those outward-looking roles driving innovation and customer engagement, and the inward-looking roles focused on operations. 

Innovation fatigue. Only one in 100 good innovative ideas make it to commercial success, and four in ten organisations have ‘zombie’ innovation projects - poorly performing initiatives that haven’t been stopped and are sucking in time and effort away from the ones that could work. 

The coming of age of AI. Four in ten organisations are now using AI in a commercial way (i.e. moved beyond an experiment). This is occurring across all sectors. Has AI’s time now come? 

No trust, but no action. Four in ten do not trust third parties with their personal data. Despite this distrust, half don’t modify their behaviour or change their privacy settings to any great degree to minimise data issues. 

Gender balance. The sector remains hugely skewed towards men. A sizeable minority of respondents (20%+) do not feel it matters, and do not feel greater gender balance would improve the effectiveness of tech. 

The sector is driven by purpose. When asked to pick the single most important factor in their career, technologists overwhelmingly selected ‘purpose’ over ‘money’ or ‘status’. 

This is irrespective of job role or salary. You can download the full report, read participants’ comments as well as play with our data sandpit where you can filter results by location, sector and job role, by visiting: www.harveynash.com/techsurvey 

For more information about the survey contact Michelle Thomas, 44 20 7333 2677 / michelle.thomas@harveynash.com