Is it the line of business or IT leading cloud initiatives? According to the latest paper from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), IT directors believe that cloud adoption is driven principally by their IT function as part of a strategic shift, rather than the need for change driven by business decision makers.

The study, which polled 250 IT and business decision makers in large enterprises, found that overall cloud adoption now stands at 88%, with more than two thirds (67%) of users expecting to increase their adoption of cloud services over the coming year.

According to the research, IT decision makers are more likely to think the head of IT or CIO is driving migration to the cloud, while business development managers (BDM) are more likely to say it is driven by the CEO.

CIF dug further into the trends and found a variety of differences between business and IT. IT is more likely to report faster access to technology as a key benefit, compared with BDM more likely to report cost savings, while IT is more likely to note that replacing legacy tech is driving investment opportunities within their cloud initiatives. IT is also more pessimistic about their organisation’s digital strategy – only 18% of those surveyed said it was ‘completely clear’, compared with 33% on the business development side.

“Aligning IT with business strategy is nothing new,” said Alex Hilton, Cloud Industry Forum CEO. “Organisations, which have struggled to use IT to achieve business objectives, are often due to differences in departmental goals and culture, or a mutual ignorance of each other’s methods, resulting in ineffectual products and systems, which fail to provide an effective return on investment.

“These findings are critical therefore to our understanding of the institutional and organisational challenges confronted by many in both the IT department and the wider business,” Hilton added. “Perceptions and expectations are widely different and those enterprises looking to deliver digital transformation projects effectively need to address this disconnect head on.”