By Anne Widjaja
IT organisations will be expected to deliver on multiple priorities without any increase in IT budgets in 2012, according to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner.
Conducted in the fourth quarter of 2011, the survey included responses from 2335 CIOs across 37 industries and 45 different countries. The resulting report, ‘Amplifying the Enterprise: the 2012 CIO Agenda’, represents the world’s most comprehensive examination of business priorities and CIO strategies.
The survey showed that innovation in IT was increasingly becoming a core priority for businesses, and reported that CIOs are increasingly combining technologies, such as analytics/business intelligence/mobility, cloud and social media, to address business priorities and improve customer experience.
Dave Aron, vice president and Gartner Fellow said the results showed “that CIOs believe that the customer experience is the greatest opportunity for IT-enabled innovation”.
“As business executives see the potential of technology to transform customer channels and the customer experience, their view of technology has leapfrogged conventional ideas of IT,” he said.
Mark McDonald, group vice president, Gartner Executive Programs and Gartner Fellow, believes that CIOs are using technology to ‘amplify’ the enterprise, which reflects the changing nature of business strategies and the role of technology to realise strategies. McDonald also highlighted the importance of strengthening customer service and sending clear market signals to customers.
“Mobility, social media, information and analytics can be used to reimagine the customer experience, as well as sales and service channels. These technologies do more than automate or administer processes; they are the processes and the sources of value,” McDonald said.
This shift to utilising new, customer-oriented technologies was reflected in the survey’s ranking of the top 10 CIO Business and Technology Priorities for 2012.
Analytics/business intelligence was revealed as the top ranked technology priority, and mobile technologies came in second.
Despite its second rank, mobility strategies in particular were revealed as an important development in priorities, with 61 per cent of enterprises reporting that they wanted to improve their mobile capabilities over the next three years. It seems that competition will intensify in the mobility space, as the majority of respondents revealed their intent to become market leaders in mobility within their respective industries.
Although improving customer experience would logically indicate an increase in IT resources, less than half (46 per cent) of the CIO respondents reported that their IT budgets would increase from 2011 to 2012, in terms of actual spending. It was found that an average firm’s IT budget will only increase by a modest 2 -3 per cent.
On a global weighted average basis, CIO IT budgets are also anticipated to be essentially flat for 2012.
Although investment is growing in Latin America (with a 12.7 per cent IT budget increase) and the Asia/Pacific (with an 3.4 per cent increase), investments were found to be weakest amongst the largest enterprises in Northern America (decreasing 0.6 per cent) and Europe (decreasing 0.7 per cent).
However, despite the plateau in IT budgets and fears of economic uncertainty, CIOs still ranked increasing growth as the top business priority of 2012. Ranking as second and third top business priorities in 2012 was attracting and retaining new customers and reducing costs.
“Technology’s role in the enterprise is increasing. This does not mean, however, that the role of the IT organisation is increasing,” McDonald said.
“In the face of continued economic uncertainty and government austerity, business strategies call for a combination of growth and operational efficiency. As reflected in the 2012 CIO Agenda survey findings, effective leaders see customers as the key factor in both of these strategic components, with the customer experience their focal point in reconciling potentially conflicting goals.”
