Allan Alter

What is the essence of the CIO’s role? It’s an important question because the definition of the CIO is morphing and fracturing. Our surveys say fewer than half of CIOs report to CEOs while more report to CFOs. Does that mean the CIO role has been downgraded, or that Sarbanes-Oxley is changing the CFO’s role? […]

In our October 2005 Business Intelligence survey, more than 90 percent of IT executives at mid-tier firms told us they planned to increase their efforts to apply IT to business intelligence. Two years later, our 2007 BI study shows these firms are avid BI users. While they don’t use as many different kinds of BI […]

Overall, business intelligence is an IT success story: Our most recent IT spending survey found that BI spending is increasing more quickly than spending on any other application. This month’s survey reveals that 72 percent of users say their BI efforts have had a major and measurable impact on their companies’ bottom lines. But not […]

Strategy expert Gary Hamel, co-founder of the London Business Management Innovation Lab, sees CIOs playing a central role in redefining how companies will manage themselves in the coming decades, partly because of the importance of IT to the operations of business. Yet, he says, CIOs aren’t doing enough to help lead this change to a […]

The efficiency-focused management model has run its course, says strategist Gary Hamel. To see the future of management, look to the Internet, open source, free markets and democratic institutions. Has management as we know it reached the end of the road? Strategy expert Gary Hamel thinks so. Yes, traditional management approaches have led us to […]

Compared with their peers at larger companies, mid-market CIOs are under far less pressure to reduce costs; only a third say their company’s top management believes there is fat in the IT budget, about half the rate at companies with revenues of more than $500 million. Maybe that’s why so many of these companies aren’t […]

For several years, IT organizations have benefited from an expanding economy. Most companies have focused on boosting revenues instead of reducing costs and that has spared chief information officers from having to slash their budgets. To be sure, CIOs, like all prudent businesspeople, keep seeking ways to reduce the cost of doing business. But the […]

Cloning should be a priority for about one in four CIOs. We asked IT executives whether they’ve ever worked in an IT organization with an employee (a manager, a technician, another executive) who was considered “irreplaceable”—someone without whom the IT function would be severely maimed if not entirely crippled. It turns out 27 percent have […]

You don’t need a big IT budget to investigate or invest in emerging technologies. Nearly one in four mid-market companies are early adopters of new information technologies, according to our 2007 study of emerging technologies; 23 of the 30 technologies listed on the following page are being deployed, tested or explored by at least half […]

We asked CIOs who participated in this month’s Emerging Technologies Survey to tell us which Web 2.0 applications they use personally. It turns out they’re avid consumers of many of these technologies. Around half watch video online and use wikis, blogs and RSS; about a third use social networking sites like LinkedIn; and 12 percent […]

You know that vile slogan, “Kill them all; let God sort them out?” In IT, we have a similar attitude: “Collect it all; let marketing sort it out.” We can’t keep increasing the amount of customer data we collect by 51 percent a year, as our October Customer Strategies Survey found we’ve been doing. That […]

Emerging technologies are the stuff IT dreams are made of. Their potential to improve processes, productivity and profits are a big part of what makes IT so fascinating. But CIOs know they can’t just install a new system and expect instant, automatic results. That’s why, in CIO Insight’s 2007 Emerging Technologies Survey, we not only […]