Priorities within IT are moving away from the large-scale enterprise deployments of the 1990s because technologies such as virtualisation, collaboration and analytics, can be deployed more cheaply, scaled quickly, and be more easily adapted, according to a Gartner report released yesterday. And CIO’s will become more focused on strategic activities, not just cost-cutting, both within IT and for the business as a whole, Gartner's survey of 1,568 CIOs in medium to large enterprises across the world found.
The top 10 technology priorities for 2010 are virtualisation, cloud computing, "Web 2.0" collaborative technologies, networking and VoIP, analytics and business intelligence, mobile, data and document storage and management, services and service-oriented architecture, security technologies, and IT management, according to the survey.
The top 10 business priorities are business process improvement, cost reduction, increased use of analytics, improved workforce effectiveness, attracting and retaining new customers, managing change initiatives, creating new products and services, better targeting of customers, business operations consolidation, and expanding current customer relationships.
Gartner expects IT budgets to remain essentially flat in 2010, and the bulk of spending to remain on traditional and existing efforts. The lightweight, modular technologies that have risen to the top of the technology priority list won't account for a huge amount of spending.
One reason is that they are cheaper to deploy than traditional enterprise apps, costing thousands of dollars not millions for the initial deployments. Another is that CIOs are still figuring out the implications of the technologies, their potential risks and benefits, and the appropriate structures and methodologies that need to be in place to effectively use them.
The survey also finds a shift in CIOs' attention from an IT focus to a shared focus on business and IT strategy, especially in large businesses, Gartnet says. In the last year, "CIOs have gotten better at helping executives see the difference" between IT strategy and the use of IT to further business strategy, he notes. Those CIOs who continue to focus on just IT strategy in isolation from the business will find that their mandate will become "all about cost-cutting."