CIO Technology Priorities Concentrate on Realizing Value From Existing Assets
CIOs continue to invest in technologies beyond the infrastructure core. However, the focus of these investments has shifted from planting emerging technologies to harvesting enterprise investments. This explains the apparent stability in CIO technology priorities shown in Table 1. CIOs expect to:
• Invest in business intelligence applications and information consolidation in order to raise enterprise visibility and transparency, particularly around sales and operational performance. These investments are expected to pay extra dividends by responding to new regulatory and financial reporting requirements.
• Invest in ERP technologies, a focus that reflects ERP’s core position in enterprise operations. CIOs also plan simplification measures in 2009 that reduce the number of ERP instances, vendors and software licenses. These investments coincide with the priority that CIOs are giving to legacy application modernization.
• Invest in server and storage technologies to meet enterprise wide demand for these services.
“Some critics might say that CIO technology priorities could be more ambitious, but considering that CIOs have modest resources requiring close management, it’s clear why they are looking to derive more value from what they have before making significant purchases,” Mr. McDonald said.
