Allan Alter

This month’s research on the role of the CIO starts off with good news: CIOs are keeping their jobs longer than ever. The average CIO has now been on the job for 5.7 years, fully a year longer than when CIO Insight started tracking CIO tenure, in 2002. Yet, although there is plenty of evidence […]

When Chase-Pitkin Home and Garden outsourced part of the development work on a Web-based order-entry system two years ago, things didn’t go as smoothly as the company had hoped. According to T. Christopher Dorsey, then-CIO and controller at the Rochester, N.Y.-based home-improvement division of Wegmans Food Markets Inc., “It’s fair to say the internal IT […]

This year’s CIO Insight spending survey finds that IT budgets in 2006-when weighted to reflect the fact that small and midsize companies far outnumber large companies, which have giant IT budgets-are up by 5.4 percent over 2005. That’s a slightly larger increase than last year’s (unweighted) 5 percent budget increase. And since more than 70 […]

It’s time companies got as serious about information as they are about technology. A disturbing new study sponsored by Deloitte Consulting LLP, and conducted jointly with CFO Research Services, has found that the billions invested in information technology still aren’t producing great information. More than four out of five companies report that the financial and […]

With leadership, perception is the better part of reality: It’s hard to be a good leader if your followers don’t see you as one. Sadly, few people will tell their bosses what they really think of their leadership. Yet it’s important that CIOs find out. Companies urgently need CIOs who are effective leaders, and CIOs […]

It’s been a year of unsettling events and natural catastrophes. Hurricanes led to a jarring hike in gasoline and energy prices. Escalating interest rates, higher healthcare costs and a real-estate bubble on the verge of bursting threatened to reduce consumer spending. Despite all this, the U.S. economy enters 2006 with plenty of forward momentum. The […]

What does the survey measure? CIO Insight’s 2005 Vendor Value Survey measures how U.S.-based IT executives generally perceive the value of their vendors’ product and service offerings, and those executives’ overall satisfaction with the support these vendors provide. How were the vendors selected? The published results include only vendors that received 40 or more qualified […]

Enterprise Applications SAP retains the top ranking for the third year. SAP is a company that inspires strong feelings among its customers—it’s on the top-ten list for most often receiving excellent grades as well as poor ones. Still, it consistently scores five to seven points higher than its main rival, Oracle. While SAP’s scores have […]

In past surveys, consulting, outsourcing and telecom firms fared poorly. But this year, Accenture and Deloitte dramatically improved their scores, by 14.1 and 11.9 percentage points respectively, while two telecoms—BellSouth and Sprint Nextel—broke away from the telecom pack. Intuit suffered the biggest fall: Its overall rating dropped to 59.5 percent, causing its rank to free […]

It’s amazing how much better a vendor can get when new competitors turn up the heat. In previous vendor value surveys, outsourcers and telecom companies have been the lowest-scoring industries. Both industries are under attack—the U.S. outsourcing and consulting firms by Indian competitors, and telecom companies by cable and VoIP providers. Yet Accenture, Deloitte, Sprint […]

Will announcing an IT investment help or hurt your company’s stock price? That’s among the hardest questions for a CIO to answer. But in a study entitled “The Moderating Effect of Context on the Market Reaction to IT Investments,” to be published in the Journal of Information Systems in 2006, three academic researchers provide guidance. […]

Achieving growth is the order of the day: According to this month’s CIOInsight study on alignment, 80 percent of for-profit companies say increasing revenues rather than reducing costs is their primary strategy for improving earnings. That means the never-ending task of aligning IT with the business is now focused on launching new products, improving speed […]