In or Out IT? Where should a CIO be?

MUMBAI, INDIA: As needs and opportunities evolve, more CIOs will find themselves leading in areas outside of traditional IT. In addition to their tending role, they are starting to assume responsibility for hunting for digital opportunities and harvesting value.

"IT cannot expect to secure additional funding without assuming new responsibilities or producing new results," said Dave Aron, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "Reacting to limited budgets by restructuring costs, outsourcing and doing more with less made sense from 2002 to 2011, when the supply of innovative technologies was scarce. Adapting to, and leading, in the digital world requires doing things differently, yet in ways consistent with the demands of digital technologies. CIOs need to make the case that mainstream emerging mobile, big data, social and cloud technologies justify revisiting IT budget and investment levels."

Some 67 per cent of CIOs surveyed have significant leadership responsibilities outside of IT, with only 33 per cent having no other such responsibilities. This situation contrasts sharply with 2008, when almost half of CIOs had no responsibilities outside of IT. Almost a fifth of CIOs now act as their enterprise's chief digital officer (CDO), leading digital commerce and channels. Although this nascent role varies in scope and style, it normally includes championing the digital vision for the business - that is, ensuring that the business is evolving optimally in the new digital context.

Enterprises realize on average only 43 per cent of technology's business potential, according to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner, Inc.'s Executive Programs. That number has to grow for IT to remain relevant in an increasingly digital world.

A worldwide survey was conducted in the fourth quarter in 2012 and included 2,053 CIOs, representing more than $230 billion in CIO IT budgets and covering 36 industries in 41 countries.

The Gartner Executive Programs report, "Hunting and Harvesting in a Digital World: The 2013 CIO Agenda," showed that CIO IT budgets have been flat to negative ever since the dot-com bust of 2002. For 2013, CIO IT budgets are projected to be slightly down, with a weighted global average decline of 0.5 per cent.

Over the last 18 months, digital technologies - including mobile, analytics, big data, social and cloud - have reached a tipping point with business executives. Analysts said there is no choice but to increase technology's potential in the enterprise, and this means evolving IT's strategies, priorities and plans beyond tending to the usual concerns as CIOs expect their 2013 IT budgets to be essentially flat for fifth straight year.

"Digital technologies provide a platform to achieve results, but only if CIOs adopt new roles and behaviors to find digital value," said Mark McDonald, group vice president and Gartner Fellow. "CIOs require a new agenda that incorporates hunting for new digital innovations and opportunities, and harvesting value from products, services and operations.

"In a world of change, it is concerning that around half of CIOs surveyed do not see IT's enterprise role changing over the next three years," McDonald said. "IT needs new tools if it hopes to hunt for technology-intensive innovation and harvest raised business performance from transformed IT infrastructure, operations and applications. Without change, CIOs and IT consign themselves to tending a garden of legacy assets and responsibilities."

Digital technologies dominate CIO technology priorities for 2013. The top 10 global technology priorities revealed by the survey reflect a greater emphasis on externally oriented digital technologies, as opposed to traditional IT/operationally oriented systems. CIOs see these technologies as disrupting business fundamentally over the next 10 years.

When asked which digital technologies would be most disruptive, 70 per cent of CIOs cited mobile technologies, followed by big data/analytics at 55 percent, social media at 54 per cent and public cloud at 51 per cent. The disruptiveness of each of these technologies is real, but CIOs see their greatest disruptive power coming in combination, rather than in isolation.