CIOs Rank Their Top Priorities for 2008
By Allan Alter | Posted 12-20-2007CIOs Rank Their Top Priorities for 2008
CIO Insight surveyed more than 250 IT executives about their top priorities and most important technologies for 2008 and how they view the outlook for the economy and their own companies' prospects.
Cost Cutting Top Business Goal for Big Companies
Other priorities include improving customer service, business processes and IT planning. With their often massive IT budgets and overhead, cost management has always been a high priority for large organizations. But things have changed this year, and cutting business and IT costs are the most frequently cited priorities (after alignment, of course) for companies over $1 billion. Many other top priorities—improving business processes (business priority No. 2 for all companies surveyed) and improving IT planning processes (management priority No. 2), for instance—target efficiency and productivity. But this doesn't mean large companies, or smaller ones, no longer pursue growth and innovation. Better business processes can translate into competitive advantage. Improving customer service and allowing growth by supporting product innovation and expanding IT infrastructure also make the priority lists. And creating business strategy is business priority No. 3. Small companies are much less concerned about cost cutting than midsize and large organizations.
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Next page: Technologies That Provide Analysis, Efficiency Rule
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Technologies That Provide Analysis, Efficiency Rule
Business intelligence grows more important; virtualization proves critical to the IT agenda. BI tools provide insight into customer behavior and internal performance, so BI is recession proof; it's strategic whether a company aims to grow, maintain customers or improve efficiency. This year BI not only retained its No. 1 status but was cited by an even higher percentage of companies than a year ago. The most significant change from last year's list is virtualization, which climbed to fourth-place from 13th. CIOs put great stock in virtualization as a way to reduce server, storage and energy costs, and it's a sign of how important those efficiencies are.
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