CIOs Under Pressure To Grow Employers' BusinessesCIOs Under Pressure To Grow Employers' Businesses

Chief information officers say they are expected to take IT beyond security and reducing costs this year, and position computer systems into playing a significant role in business growth and competitiveness, a survey released Monday showed.

The worldwide poll of 1,400 CIOs found that business expectations for IT have changed dramatically, and the shift toward making systems more externally focused to help businesses grow customer relationships, improve competitiveness and increase overall efficiency was expected to accelerate this year, Gartner Inc. said.

The study also found a "modest budget increase" expected for the third consecutive year. CIOs expected an average rise of 2.7 percent this year, compared with 2.5 percent last year. IT budgets at companies planning to grow faster than the market are expected to increase spending by 4.8 percent.

"That's huge," Gartner analyst Mark McDonald said of the latter number. "After years of IT doesn't matter, IT doesn't matter, it must matter because people who are trying to grow are investing in it."

In a May 2003 article entitled "IT Doesn't Matter" in Harvard Business Review, Nicholas G. Carr argued that IT would eventually become a commodity and no longer a differentiator for businesses, much like having electricity is no longer a competitive advantage, since every business has it.

CIOs on average listed, in order, the top five business priorities for IT this year as business process improvement, which also topped the list last year; controlling enterprise operating costs, attracting and growing customer relationships, improving competitive advantage and improving competitiveness. The top five technology priorities were business intelligence applications, security technologies, mobile workforce enablement, collaboration technologies and customer sales and service.

While security as a business concern fell to seventh place this year from second last year, it did not mean that security was no longer an issue, Gartner said. Rather, maintaining secure systems was expected.

"In general, CIOs and IT organizations have proven that they can manage that type of traditional work well," McDonald said. "Now they're showing that they're good business managers, so companies are expected more."

Overall, the survey found that IT spending on security related tools remained healthy at a projected average increase of 4.5 percent this year.

Among the critical challenges that CIOs listed for this year was building business skills into IT organizations. Needed skills included such management disciplines as relationship and sourcing, process design and information design.

In addition, in growing IT's contribution to the business, CIOs told Gartner they would need to change the conversation with business managers from "what IT can do for me" to "how we will solve the problem together."