06 Oct SIM IT Trends: Tomorrow will be faster than today
IT is experiencing a historic period of “profound change,” according to the preliminary results of “35th Annual SIM IT Trends Study,” which were announced by The Society for Information Management during a media roundtable earlier this week. The report’s high-level results include how the role of CIOs and IT is evolving, IT budgets and leading investments, how CIOs spend their time, and the priorities of organizations and IT leaders.
“Business is changing, IT is changing and technology is changing,” said Leon Kappelman, the study’s lead researcher, who also emphasized the unprecedented speed at which these changes are occurring for IT, business and society.
The SIM IT trends survey is based on the responses of 1,002 IT managers and leaders at 717 organizations. Of the respondents, 451 are CIOs. The organizations’ average annual revenue is $5.6 billion, with an average IT budget of $288 million.
Another key trend highlighted by the survey is “enterprise optimization,” says Kappelman, a professor of information systems at the University of North Texas. “IT organizations are not focusing on cost cutting like they used to be,” but instead their focus today is on how to create value for the business.
The full report will be released prior to SIM’s national convention in Denver, Col., in early November. The chief preliminary results include:
IT Focuses More on the Business, Less on Internal Services
The concept of IT in the enterprise is in a period of transition, as IT for many organizations today is less about directly providing internal services and more about driving the business and contributing to business strategy, noted Kappelman, citing the survey results.
Of the top 10 performance measures for CIOs, the top four (value of IT to the business, IT’s contribution to strategy, customer satisfaction, and innovative new ideas) are business oriented, not IT oriented, according to Kappelman. Performance measures five through seven are IT oriented (availability, projects delivered on time, and IT cost controls), but the rest of the top 10 fall in the business category (productivity improvement, business cost reduction controls and revenue growth). In summary, seven of the top 10 performance measures for CIOs relate to business, not IT.