What Midmarket CIOs Care About Most |
Business analytics and self service, according to the newly released midmarket portion of IBM’s 2009 Global Chief Information Office Study, but CIOs of high growth companies have different priorities than those at slower growing organizations. Finally, no matter what size firm they represent, CIOs face a similar set of conflicting goals and contradictory roles. |
While the study covered over 2,500 CIOs overall, IBM has just released a Midmarket Executive Summary detailing the views of 158 CIOs of companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. As usual, bMighty is intensely interested in how midmarket CIOs differ from their enterprise counterparts. |
For example, more than half of the high-growth group gets involved in creating business strategy, compared to just 33% of enterprise CIOs. |
50% of midmarket CIOS expect to implement a virtual infrastructure in the next five years. |
Are the top 10 concerns of government CIOs the same? | While it should not come as a surprise, the economy has pushed the traditional top CIO priority – IT and business alignment – into the No. 2 slot, the annual IT Industry Trend Survey has found. |
The 2009 survey found that the top application and technology priority is business intelligence. It was followed by server virtualization, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer/corporate portals, enterprise application integration/management (EAI/EAM), and continuity planning/disaster recover. The top 10 CIO concerns are as follows: · Business productivity and cost reduction · IT and business alignment · Business agility and speed to market · Business process re-engineering · IT cost reduction · IT reliability and efficiency · IT strategic planning · Revenue generating IT innovations · Security and privacy · CIO leadership role Read more at www.information-management.com |
What CIOs Think About Windows 7 |
Most are doing some testing, but many have no firm deployment plans. What should be your company’s approach? |
Let’s face it: CIOs didn’t have to make that tough a call on the last big PC operating system upgrade. With three-fourths of companies skipping Vista and sticking with XP, according to our latest research, it became clear soon after the Vista launch that the safe bet was for companies to avoid the OS, with its application compatibility problems and heavyweight hardware requirements, and wait for the next version. Read more at bmighty.informationweek.com |
A Gartner analyst describes the changing nature of the CIO role, and the current challenges facing them CIOs see the future clearly strategically and operationally |
Recently I had the opportunity to work with two dozen CIOs as the facilitator of a three-hour discussion on their issues. I talked with 15 CIOs prior to the session to understand the issues at the top of their mind and the areas of strength they could contribute to the discussion. The results, shown in the figure below, provide a snapshot of the current challenges facing CIOs and their enterprises. Read more at blogs.gartner.com |
Why you should consider a cloud computing option in your next RFP.
For CIOs, Clouds Are The Fourth Column |
Clouds are transforming IT; that’s not news. But regardless of your cloud computing agenda, clouds are already affecting your IT plans, because they give IT executives a cudgel with which to bludgeon traditional software and infrastructure providers. |
Every IT decision of any real consequence starts with a shortlist of three competing offerings. One of them is usually the incumbent provider — Cisco, IBM, EMC, Microsoft, and so on. Along with this incumbent are a couple of alternate providers. Sometimes these providers are simply “column fodder” designed to rein in the incumbent; but many IT companies have built healthy businesses by being the alternate. |
It’s time for a fourth column: a cloud-based offering. That means every Request for Proposals that a company issues must have a cloud-based option, regardless of whether the company actually plans to adopt clouds. Here’s why. Read more at www.informationweek.com |
How are today’s chief information officers successfully growing profits for their businesses? The 2009 IBM Global CIO Study explored this and other issues facing CIOs during challenging times. We talked with more than 2,500 CIOs from over 75 countries and 15 industries. Over the course of our one-hour, face-to-face conversations with them, we learned how they are:
- Driving technology innovation to make it a reality
- Increasing the return on investment (ROI) in information technology (IT)
- Expanding the business impact of IT
Read more at www-935.ibm.com |
Successful CIOs blend roles that seem contradictory, but are actually complementary, reports IBM in its first global study of CIOs. |
Successful CIOs blend three pairs of roles. While these roles seem contradictory, they are actually complementary. |
on a day by day basis CIOs take on these three double roles:
• An insightful visionary and an able pragmatist.
• A savvy value creator and a relentless cost cutter.
• A collaborative business leader and an inspiring IT manager.
When CIOs combine these roles, they make three things happen in the enterprise: make innovation real, raise the ROI of IT and expand the impact of the business, says IBM. Read more at cio.co.nz |
What type of CIO are you?
Global CIO: Welcome To The CIO Revolution: A New IT Manifesto
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CIOs are rebelling against career stereotypes, technology paradigms, and in-bred risk-aversion to become aggressive drivers of innovation, growth, and market engagement.
Read more at www.informationweek.com |
Has the economic conditions created a new willingness to share common commodity services? | CIOs Take New Look at Sharing IT Infrastructure, Apps |
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The world’s top hotel companies have collectively invested tens of millions of dollars to implement their own customized reservation systems–considered the heart of their operations. Each hotelier views the capabilities of these systems as providing them with some competitive advantage over how they calculate rates and room availability. |
During the past six months, board members for Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG)–a global trade association of hoteliers and technology companies that includes Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Marriott International, Hyatt and InterContinental Hotels Group–have been actively discussing possible areas for shared services among participants, including shared property management systems, reservation systems and networks. Read more at www.computerworld.com |
An interesting view from a Gartner analyst. Rationing IT and the healthcare debate |
| Using the idea of supply and demand to manage resources is not inherently wrong. However, we are using it the wrong way. A supply and demand model exists to determine a market-clearing price and quantity, not allocate a fixed resource at a fixed price. The result is that enterprises are rationing IT in a way that does them harm. |
The supply and demand model for IT is effective in low change, high cost containment situations where little is gained investing in new solutions or new ideas. |
If your are going to use a supply and demand model then use it right - to set a price and quantity for IT services and therefore the budget against actual demand rather than having IT ration itself into a fixed space box. |
Finally, rationing IT is increasingly unnecessary as substitutes for internal IT solutions and infrastructure come into the marketplace. Read more at blogs.gartner.com |
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What Midmarket CIOs Care About Most
