Business intelligence and analytics are the top priority
for CIOs, an IBM study reveals.
The face to face survey, called
"The New
Voice of the CIO", of more than 2,500 CIOs worldwide, showed
that leveraging analytics to gain a competitive advantage and
improve business decision-making is now the top priority for
CIOs.
IBM's own CIO, Pat Toole, said the role of the CIO was changing
dramatically. He said CIOs were trying to standardise routine
processes and simplify their existing IT infrastructure to reduce
costs on the one hand. On the other they were spending more time
planning strategic projects to drive growth.
The survey also revealed that data reliability and security are
increasingly urgent concerns, with 71% of CIOs planning to spend
more on risk management and compliance.
Other key findings of the survey include:
- 76% are implementing or planning virtualisation projects to cut
energy costs
- 76% anticipate building a strongly centralised infrastructure
in the next five years
- 50%-plus expect to implement completely standardised, low-cost
business processes
The survey also found that
CIOs will in future spend 55% of their time driving innovation
and growth, and only 45% on traditional IT tasks like
infrastructure and operations management.
Pat Toole said CIOs understood that analytics can be key to
identifying new growth markets, whether it was new ways to manage a
utility grid, smarter healthcare systems or new supply chain
management systems.
"Managing and leveraging new intelligence through analytics is
something that today's CIO is pursuing to gain competitive
advantage in these new markets," Toole said.
The study found CIOs busy with or thinking about projects that
could provide immediate and long-term financial impact. These
ranged from process improvement to taking advantage of technologies
that can provide.
Key technologies were business intelligence and analytics,
virtualisation and green IT, service oriented architectures (SOA),
service management and cloud computing.
CIOs also aimed to connect staff, customers and business
partners remotely and on the move with unified communications
projects, collaboration and social networking tools, and web 2.0
projects, the study said.