Gartner CIO Priorities

At the end of each year, Research firm Gartner commissions a worldwide survey of CIO s to gain a deeper understanding of the issues that affect them, and their priorities for the following 12 months. The latest survey results, for the 2009 calendar year, were released on January 14. The table below gives us a snapshot of the top ten Business and Technology Priorities of over 1500 CIO s surveyed.

Whilst I am sure there are no surprises in either of those lists for most of you, in the press release from Gartner they did make quite an interesting comment on what CIO s need to focus on during 2009…

“CIOs Must Be Decisive and Resourceful in 2009″

Meeting the challenges of 2009 requires CIOs to lead their organisations and enterprises through decisions that have no simple answers. CIOs need to lead and have the foresight to look at IT in new ways. They will demonstrate this leadership through four imperatives:

Top 10 Business Priorities

1. Business process improvement
2. Reducing enterprise costs
3. Improving enterprise workforce effectiveness
4. Attracting and retaining new customers
5. Increasing the use of information/analytics
6. Creating new products and markets more effectively
7. Targeting customers and markets more effectively
8. Managing change initiatives
9. Expanding current customer relationships
10. Expanding into new markets and geographies

Top 10 Technology Priorities

1. Business Intelligence
2. Enterprise Applications (ERP, CRM and others)
3. Servers and storage technologies (Virtualisation)
4. Legacy application modernisation
5. Collaboration technologies
6. Networking, voice and data communications
7. Technical infrastructure
8. Security technologies
9. Service-orientated applications and architecture
10. Document management

• Be decisive in setting priorities on actions that raise enterprise effectiveness, with a focus on improving business process, using business intelligence to raise visibility, and enhancing workforce effectiveness.
• Do the “first things faster,” as changing economic conditions render a large project irrelevant. CIOs need to apply a prioritisation process to their schedule and recognise that other important priorities can wait. They need to place greater emphasis on the schedule (when) rather than the priorities (why).
• Be resourceful in restructuring IT to raise its productivity and agility, because the business will not reduce its demand for IT just because CIOs have fewer resources.
• Modernise the technical infrastructure, as new technologies offer lower cost, use less energy, deliver better performance and provide greater capacity; the business will need all of these in the immediate future”

Gartner are pushing heavily along the line of prioritising the right projects. But how do you prioritise the dozens if not hundreds of potential projects on your plate? By looking at your business through Data^#3’s 5Cs lens.

With an understanding of how your organisation can Reduce Cost, Consolidate, Control, Co-ordinate and Conserve Cash, you are not only armed with the information you need to action Gartner’s recommendations above, you will also be in a far greater position than your competition during 2009 and beyond.