Friday, July 16, 2010

2010 is the Year of Transition, Gartner Says

On the threshold of the publication of the 2010 edition of Gartner’s annual CIO Survey, where 1600 of CIOs were asked about their plans and priorities for the year, Mark McDonald, GVP of Gartner Executive Programs, shared some of its findings.

According to the survey, 2010 will be a time of transition from recession to recovery economically, strategically from a focus on efficiency to productivity, and technically speaking from heavyweight to lightweight technologies. But all the while IT budgets will remain tight. Only 6% of the polled CIOs see actual real growth coming in 2010.

Leading CIOs are inventing new rules for the new economy with the focus on productivity, collaboration, and innovation. Strategically CIOs are reshaping their focus from cost efficiency to productivity. This shift is critical for capturing customers and market shares. Additionally, business leaders are reconnecting IT with business performance.

Interesting is the 3-year forecast: by 2013 CIOs see technology as transitioning their role from technology service provider to a source of competitive advantage. This trend is also observed by Zinnov in the outsourced product development space we discussed earlier.

Technology choices are transforming as well. CIOs predict a shift to lightweight technologies that can be implemented quickly without significant expense. For instance, virtualization is the top technology, followed by cloud computing and social tools. Virtualization investment expenses are expected to accelerate in 2010 as Gartner estimates that until now only about 1 in 5 services has been virtualized.

Based on the results of the survey, Gartner recommends CIOs to concentrate on operational results and relationships as well as to focus more on raising productivity than on cutting costs as raising productivity increases opportunity to create value while cutting costs doesn’t drive growth.

2010 should be a year of the transition from IT being a resource based, back office function to a result-based source of innovation and advantage.

Source: Gartner

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