Every Budget is Transforming into IT Budget: Gartner

Bangalore: Digitization has played a cardinal role in the shifting of budgets catered within an organization over the past couple of decades, with respect to the technology needs. What initially was a meager 20 percent of the overall technology spending outside the IT sector, will be touching 90 percent by 2020, reports Gartner.

The Nexus of Forces is leading this transformation. The Nexus is the convergence and mutual reinforcement of social, mobile, cloud and information patterns that drive new business scenarios.

Organizations are digitizing segments of business, such as moving marketing spend from analog to digital, or digitizing the research and development budget. Secondly, organizations are digitizing how they serve their clients, in order to drive higher client retention. Thirdly, they are turning digitization into new revenue streams. Gartner analysts said this is resulting in every budget becoming an IT budget.
To address these changes, organizations will create the role of a Chief Digital Officer as part of the business unit leadership, which will become a new seat on the executive table.

“The Chief Digital Officer will prove to be the most exciting strategic role in the decade ahead, and IT leaders have the opportunity to be the leaders who will define it,” said David Willis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The Chief Digital Officer plays in the place where the enterprise meets the customer, where the revenue is generated and the mission accomplished. They’re in charge of the digital business strategy. That’s a long way from running back office IT, and it’s full of opportunity.”

However, there is serious work that needs to be done. IT leaders need to make sure they have policies and procedures in place to respond to the new Nexus-driven threats. They must counter cyber attacks, and anticipate new attacks from new sources at a high scale. They will need to respond to “reputation” warfare and defend against social media “mercenaries”. They should also invest in new technologies that support employee-owned devices such as mobile device management, containerization and virtualization.

“Security investments are going to dramatically increase,” Mr. Willis said. “An already large security market is about to get much bigger, growing by 56 percent from current levels in five years time, while cloud security will almost triple.”

CEOs want their CIOs to make their impact felt where the enterprise meets the outside world. They want the CIO to unleash the forces that will differentiate their business. They don’t want the CIO spending all of their time automating the back office.

“The value CEOs seek is in digitizing the interface between your enterprise and its customer or citizen, creating whole new business opportunities in the process,” Mr. Willis said. “The Nexus holds the promise of new revenue streams; new missions; and new possibilities.”