CIO Insight Staff

Product and process innovation will be the next growth target for CIOs. Just 5.4 percent of corporate IT budgets on average are devoted specifically to furthering innovation. That suggests companies are underinvesting in IT that might promote innovation and create new products. Practices that help companies gain benefits from technical innovations, such as encouraging technology […]

Mobility is more than just talking, sending e-mail and working in a hotel lobby. Mobile phones, laptops and PDAs have emerged from their beginnings as personal communication and productivity devices to become tools for improving business efficiency and customer service. Lower costs, the wide acceptance of mobile technologies by consumers, and the ability to access […]

Plan for the best, prepare for the worst. In 2005, more and more executives said growth, rather than cost cutting, was the major strategic objective for their companies. That goal will keep alignment at the top of the heap of IT priorities, since IT and business executives alike agree that growth requires good alignment. But […]

The rise of broadband will open new opportunities for providing self-service. Customer service remains an important priority for IT. As more consumers sign up for broadband at home, companies are turning to the Web to improve the quality of service and provide another venue for self-service. Their goal is to provide an alternative service channel, […]

Business intelligence is now firmly entrenched as a strategic technology. As a result, more companies will adopt BI technology to stay competitive, and those that already have it will broaden its use. Already, mid-level managers and planning staff use BI tools at 61 percent of companies. Not only will they attempt more kinds of analysis, […]

More CIOs will have split their career between IT and business. Last year’s Top Trends issue noted that the CIO position has become a hybrid business-IT post. CIOs with some business background are not uncommon. What is new is that a quarter of CIOs have divided their careers evenly between business and IT. It’s a […]

Information technology’s glass ceiling is cracked, but not broken. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 31 percent of computer and information systems managers are women. That means there are simply too many talented women in IT management for the proportion of female CIOs to remain at just 9 percent. And since companies seek CIOs […]

People on the go need to collaborate on the fly. Nearly all IT executives foresee a big boost in productivity ahead—not necessarily by giving more technology to individual workers but by providing it to groups that collaborate. Since computer users often travel or work from home, mobile technology and collaborative technology go hand-in-hand, for nonprofessionals […]

What once appeared arcane will become more and more central. As high-growth companies have figured out, IT architecture and infrastructure have never been so closely tied to corporate strategy as they are today. It doesn’t matter whether CIOs are trying to achieve faster growth, better business processes, lower costs or global expansion; none of these […]

CIOs continue to wring more efficiency and effectiveness out of their systems. Most companies have been aggressively pursuing standardization and consolidation for years, first to solve the Y2K problem, then to slash IT costs during the post-dot-com recession. And standardization and consolidation of the IT infrastructure will remain the common IT strategy, despite—or perhaps because […]

Life on the bleeding edge is becoming more attractive, but payoffs may be elusive. A trend we reported last year keeps growing: The percentage of companies that call themselves early adopters is still increasing. That’s because they are worrying more about missing new business opportunities in the current growth environment, and striving to be flexible […]

CIOs haven’t given up on its promise. Knowledge management has long suffered a bad rap as a sexy technology that falls short on delivering business value. But for two years in a row, KM has ranked a respectable 7th on our list of critical technologies. (Twenty-one technologies were ranked on this list in 2005.) This […]