|
By Mel Duvall
The difficult economic climate in 2009 put pressure on CIOs and senior IT leaders to boost productivity and search for cost reductions, a survey released this week by the Society for Information Management (SIM) has found.
While that may not come as a surprise, the economy did push the traditional top CIO concern, IT and business alignment, out its No. 1 spot.
"The results of the study confirm that the economic downturn has caused a significant shift in priorities," said Jerry Luftman, a distinguished professor of information systems at Stevens Institute of Technology. "IT executives are focusing on ensuring that business is conducted efficiently to get more mileage out of their budgets."
While business productivity and cost reductions did take over the No. 1 spot, IT and business alignment still came in at No.2, showing it continues to be a chief concern.
The results of the annual IT trends survey were presented in depth this week at the annual SIMposium 09 conference taking place in Seattle. SIM is a national organization of CIOs and senior IT professionals.
Another important insight to be gained from the survey is a gain in the percentage of CIOs reporting to chief executive officers. In the 2009 survey, 49% of respondents said they reported directly to the CEO, compared to 43.5% in 2008. SIM conducted interviews with 250 IT leaders for the survey.
The gain in CIOs reporting to the CEO provides added comfort to the influence CIOs are wielding in their organizations. A 2007 SIM survey raised concern when it found that the percentage of CIOs reporting to the CEOs fell 14% to 31.4%. At the time, Luftman said he believed the 2007 results were an anomaly, and the results from the 2008 and 2009 surveys appear to have borne that out.
In terms of application/technology importance, business intelligence came out on top in the survey, followed by server virtualization, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer/corporate portals, enterprise application/integration/management (EAI/EAM), and continuity planning/disaster recovery.
Another interesting perspective to be gained from this year's survey, is a question that asked CIOs how they spend their time. On average CIOs said they spent 76% of their time on non-technical issues such as human resources, strategy and relationship management with the business.
Here are the Top 10 Concerns of CIOs according to the 2009 SIM IT Trends survey:
1. Business productivity and cost reduction
2. IT and business alignment
3. Business agility and speed to market
4. Business process and re-engineering
5. IT cost reduction
6. IT reliability and efficiency
7. IT strategic planning
8. Revenue generating IT innovations
9. Security and privacy
10. CIO leadership role.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
