Focus of the CIO for 2010 and Beyond

I’m a bit slow on my reading lately….so bear with me as I catch up. Just read through the 2010 State of the CIO Survey published by CIO.com.

A few highlights:

• This year, nearly one third—30 percent—of the 594 IT leaders we polled say meeting or beating business goals is a personal leadership competency critically needed by their organizations, up significantly from the 18 percent who said so last year.
• 22 percent cited “identifying and seizing on commercial opportunities”—more than triple last year’s 6 percent
• Aligning IT initiatives with business has dropped significantly over the last 2 years – 64 percent, down from 71 percent last year and 82 percent two years ago
• Still, most CIOs have no P&L duties. According to our survey, just 9 percent head up a line of business
• There are impressive jumps in the numbers of IT leaders concentrating on customer although the majority of respondents still don’t spend their time with any

Interesting results.

A few more stats:

Projects that CIO’s canceled last year:

• 39% were were infrastructure upgrades
• 31% enterprise software rollouts
• 21% were unified communications projects
• 20% were network upgrades

Projects that got funded were:

• 63% – projects that improved end-user productivity
• 53% – projects improved the quality of products
• 39% – projects that helped create new offerings

From those stats, it looks like CIO’s have been focusing on driving growth and improvements in the business…which is an excellent thing to see.

Take a second to review those that got canceled. Those are the projects that aren’t sexy. They are the ‘plumbing’ of the organizations….nobody outside of IT really cares or understands what a ‘network upgrade’ means to the company.

But…what happens next year when the recessions is over and the IT infrastructure can’t keep up? Will the CIO & IT organization have moved off to the cloud entirely as Gartner predicts will happen with 20% of businesses by 2012?

CIO reports on another Gartner study that says 2010 is the year of transformation of IT using social technologies. According to Gartner, this approach “raises productivity and increases value from current IT assets”. Perhaps CIO’s have been looking to the future and realized that they can get more value from their current assets.  This realization has allowed them to shift their focus from operational to transformational as reported in the survey results above.

The next few years in the IT space will be interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing what 2010 & beyond brings for CIO’s.

What do you think about these results?  Are you seeing the same things in your organization that are reported in the CIO.com survey?