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By Michael Neubarth
Industry veteran Dale Kutnick is senior vice president and head of Gartner's CIO program, which is called Gartner Executive Programs (ExP). When he rejoined Gartner in 2005, Kutnick, in a sense, came full circle, returning after 14 years with rich experience gained as co-founder, CEO, research director, and chairman of META Group, which was acquired by Gartner in April 2005.
I spoke with Kutnick about Gartner's CIO program, its value to CIOs, and the key issues and trends he sees confronting CIOs today.
Decision-making Is Key
What in Gartner's service is most valuable to CIOs?
"At the highest level, they are looking for help in making decisions," said Kutnick. "The stakes involved in making IT decisions continues to increase, and they're already in the millions. CIOs can't afford to make too many mistakes. We help them with organizational issues, cost-cutting, contracts, virtualization, consolidation, M&A, and vendor issues. We help CIOs analyze and make IT-related decisions. We're selling a relationship that allows them to get answers and justification."
What are the most important issues and trends for CIOs today?
"IT innovation," said Kutnick. "Such as how to change or further automate call center management. Businesses want to reach out to new customers."
Other top issues are business intelligence and customer relationship management, he said. "Business intelligence is especially important," said Kutnick. "They are looking for better insight into all facets of the business, and to exploit the stuff they put in over the last three to four years. They want to give the business more real-time information about what's going on."
"Demand for IT has not diminished," said Kutnick. "It has gone up. Business intelligence is a major direction that CIOs are pursuing."
"Companies want to improve and manage their processes better," he added, "and this includes how they find, retain, and serve customers, and to increase customer satisfaction."
"Other hot issues," said Kutnick, "are virtualization, data consolidation, and software as a service, cloud computing, and social media."
Pressure Rising
The driving factor in today's economy is that CIOs must do more with less, said Kutnick. "There are more regulations, more traffic, more internal and external demands, demands for business intelligence and CRM solutions, and social media," he explained. "CIOs need to be smarter and prioritize."
"The demand on CIOs is going up. There are more problems they are facing. Regulators are putting pressure on them, are crawling all over them -- environmental, safety, emissions, carbon, foreign subsidiary, EPA, financial regulators, IRS. There's a new sheriff in town: regulators."
"There is more internal demand from the board and external demand from regulators. And there is more external demand from customers, distributors, and partners. And the CFO is uptight. There is more risk and he or she is asking for more details."
"IT teams are supporting more information requests, even though there may be fewer employees," said Kutnick. "People want more information to make better decisions. They are shopping around more, and are using the Web more. They are looking five times before they buy. They don't want to spend any more money."
"Overall, there is more work to do with fewer resources. The pressure on the CIO is more intense. There are more demands inside and outside for information. This is a problem CIOs have to deal with. There is no absolute right answer. They have to prioritize."
Do CIOs interact with each other in Gartner's service to help one another solve these problems?
"Most CIOs are willing to share," said Kutnick. "Not their most important or proprietary ideas, but information that will help each other gain insights of value." For example, he said, "CIOs will share information about their outsourcing or vendor SLAs (service level agreements). How did you get Microsoft to configure SharePoint? How did you implement social networking and get senior management to buy into it? How did you determine the ROI (return on investment)? Also, they are often willing to discuss their experiences with cloud computing, virtualization, software as a service, and data center consolidation."
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