Most CIOs and other Enterprise IT leaders believe that the employees in their firms see the services provided by Central IT as primarily constraining and/or dulling. Less than 10 percent of these senior IT executives believe that the services they provide are viewed by employees as energizing or engaging.

That’s one of the key messages that emerged from our Executive Forum conference in London last week. While not entirely surprising, the fact that so many IT leaders see the net effect of their work as largely demotivating to their firm’s employees is a sobering reality. It’s one of the reasons we chose Employee Engagement as the focus of our first project in our new Changing Nature of Work research domain. Both the full project report and the conference survey results are available to clients at www.lef.csc.com. In this month’s commentary, we will take a broad look at the pros and cons of IT from an employee engagement perspective, and outline how Enterprise IT should respond.