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A new global study has raised eyebrows: CIOs surveyed by Gartner believe that their company only uses 43 percent of its IT for business purposes. In an increasingly digital world, this proportion must grow, say the analysts. This would also change the role of the CIO.
Every second CIO today believes that their role in the company will not change in the next three years. Mark McDonald from Gartner disagrees: "If everything stays the same, CIOs will just be the gardeners of outdated systems and responsibilities." However, the top 10 priorities of CIOs for 2013 could be interpreted to mean that they have long since embarked on a new path:
Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI)
Mobile technologies
Cloud computing
Technologies for collaboration (workflow)
Modernization of legacy systems
IT management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Virtualization
security
Applications for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Traditional IT operations are of secondary importance here. Instead, CIOs want to modernize and outsource. At the same time, they are opening up IT to the outside world and focusing more on the customer and the business. According to the Gartner study, 70% of CIOs also believe that mobile technologies will be particularly business-critical in the next ten years, followed by big data and analytics with 55%. Social media is close behind with 54 percent, as is the public cloud with 51 percent. The study also revealed that it is not a single one of these technologies that challenges the CIO, but their combination.
The CIO is responsible for more than IT
Dave Aron from Gartner believes that CIOs have two priorities in 2013: "On the one hand, they are introducing new business-relevant technologies, and on the other, they are improving organization, management and governance." Ultimately, the aim is to increase the business value of IT. The fact that CIOs are no longer just "gardeners of legacy issues" is not only demonstrated by their priorities and assessments, but also by their professional practice: only one in three are still exclusively responsible for technology, 67 percent already have management responsibility outside of IT. In 2008, it was only one in two. In addition, one in five CIOs also acts as Chief Digital Officer (CDO), i.e. sets the course as a digital visionary in e-commerce.
The demands are therefore high - and they will continue to increase. What does this mean in times of stagnating IT budgets? It is not enough to simply respond to limited budgets with cost-cutting measures, says Aron from Gartner: "CIOs must make it clear that innovations such as mobile, big data, social media and cloud computing justify higher IT budgets."
Bank CIOs need to catch up
German bank IT also has some catching up to do. According to a new study by Steria Mummert Consulting and Lünendonk, more than 80 percent of German bank managers do not feel sufficiently supported. At the same time, three out of four respondents believe that the technology leaders among the banks will be able to set themselves strongly or very strongly apart from the competition by 2020. 44 percent of the managers surveyed stated that this is already the case today. One thing is clear: without new budgets, CIOs will not be able to cope with their growing business tasks.
