CIOs Must Be Decisive and Resourceful in 2009

gfmstudio — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:52:16 +0000

Meeting the challenges of 2009 requires CIOs to lead their organizations and enterprises through decisions that have no simple answers. CIOs need to lead and have the foresight to look at IT in new ways. They will demonstrate this leadership through four imperatives:
• Be decisive in setting priorities on actions that raise enterprise effectiveness, with a focus on improving business process, using business intelligence to raise visibility, and enhancing workforce effectiveness.
• Do the “first things faster,” as changing economic conditions render a large project irrelevant. CIOs need to apply a prioritization process to their schedule and recognize that other important priorities can wait. They need to place greater emphasis on the schedule (when) rather than the priorities (why).
• Be resourceful in restructuring IT to raise its productivity and agility, because the business will not reduce its demand for IT just because CIOs have fewer resources.
• Modernize the technical infrastructure, as new technologies offer lower cost, use less energy, deliver better performance and provide greater capacity; the business will need all of these in the immediate future.
“These imperatives form the basis for the CIO agenda and its focus on making the enterprise more effective,” Mr. McDonald said. “Every CIO will start at a different place, facing unique challenges and setting his or her own agenda to marshal the resources needed to make the right decisions and deliver results across the enterprise.”
This year’s survey collected data in the midst of the economic changes in the fourth quarter of 2008. As such, it provides a snapshot of CIO plans, priorities and budgets for 2009 as they stood at the end of the fourth quarter of 2009. They represent Gartner’s best current indication of CIO plans at this time. Given the volatility of current markets, Gartner EXP plans to conduct a follow-up survey in late first quarter or early second quarter of 2009 as enterprises establish new guidance on their 2009 budgets.

Additional comments from Mr. McDonald regarding the 2009 CIO Agenda survey are available on the Gartner YouTube channel at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5E69WhGwOA0, as well as on Mr. McDonald’s blog on the Gartner Blog Network at http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_mcdonald/.

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CIOs Must Be Decisive and Resourceful in 2009