New priorities needed for CIOs, says Gartner

Added by The Editor, 3 months ago.

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IT heads are spending too much time simply managing the IT department, according to market analyst firm Gartner.

That may sound nonsensical - but there's an important point to be made. In Gartner's annual 2008 CIO Survey, IT heads from throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa said that their top priority for 2008 was to deliver strategic new projects that will underpin solid business growth for their organisations.

However, their ambitions look doomed if they continue to focus primarily on operational issues, say Gartner analysts, who found that, on average, respondents spend 40% of their time managing IT teams and 60% of their IT budget running the department.

"Globally, we are seeing that CIOs need to improve the efficiency of IT, which will give the IT team space to run other projects," said Gartner vice-president research, Dave Aron. He recommends that they align the IT department with the main value that their organisation offers, such as operational excellence, product excellence, or customer relationships.

In Aron's experience, successful businesses generally excel at only one of these activities and the CIO needed to make sure the entire IT team understands how it can support its employer in this aim. And if IT staff are isolated from the rest of the organisation, then work shadowing, short-term job swaps or reverse mentoring should be a priority, he adds.

Comments

There are currently 3 comments about this blog.

John Althorpe, 3 months ago

Is anyone aware of job-swapping/shadowing amongst IT staff and the rest of the organisation? It seems a sensible idea, but it's a process that I've never come across.

Jenny Shaw, 3 months ago

What concerns me is that these are the same issues that we've been trying to address for a decade. The majority of CIOs would love to have more time and budget to focus on strategic projects rather than fire-fighting and day-to-day operations. Will this ever be possible I wonder? There doesn't seem to be an easy solution.

Jon Wright, 3 months ago

As was also highlighted in the report, a shortage of skilled IT workers isn’t helping CIOs' efforts to focus on the important strategic projects. When you're trying to fire fight because you're short staffed, the day-to-day IT issues will always get in the way of any long-term planning. Only when you’re confident you’ve got the skilled people in place to manage the organisation’s day-to-day IT demands can you start to seriously analyse what strategic IT support is needed to help grow the business.