48% say better customer service is their top business priority in 2005
33% say business process management will contribute most to strategy in 2005
63% say technology standardization will lower IT costs by a third in five years
51% of CIOs say it's likely that competition will cut profit margins in half
16% fewer CIOs say outsourcing spending will double in five years
In many ways, the coming year looks much like last year: CIOs plan to work at reducing costs while improving service, supporting growth and working hard at regulatory compliance. They're also continuing to standardize and centralize IT to improve their organization and alignment, and employing better IT and corporate performance metrics in hopes of demonstrating real results. The new twist among the 463 IT executives we polled for our second annual Future of IT survey: Business process management has become a key technology strategy for achieving the efficiency executives crave. Looking further out, CIOs expect many of these trends to continue as the technology for collecting and analyzing information grows even more efficient. They also expect the CIO's job description in the future to include furthering the role of collaboration in work processes, promoting a shared-services model of application provision, and developing new, more accurate ways of measuring the business value of IT. Success at these tasks will be critical going forward, as competition grows tougher and margins and profits grow thinner and harder to come by.
