The 2013 CIO Strategy Forecast

Bangalore: If 2012 was considered the year of the tablet and IT consumerisation, what should chief information officers be doing this year? The journey from Windows XP to Windows 7 should be well in progress, and many IT departments are more likely to shelve any further migration to Windows 8 until it has been completed. But wWhile the desktop strategy seems to be laid down, mobile device spending is steadily on the rise.

According to Gartner's IT spending forecast,  the gGlobal, spending on devices is expected to witness a growth from  6.3% to $666 billion. However, devices can’t afford to be the top priority for CIOs.

In discussion with Computer Weekly earlier,  Mark Raskino, Gartner analyst, cautions: “If you don’t have a big systematic change strategy for what technology will do for your business, then the agenda will be filled by superficial stuff like IT consumerizsation.”

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As in the words of renowned Gartner analyst, Mark Raskino: “If you are a car company or a consumer packaged goods company – how will your business change? Even a non-electronics company can be influenced by the likes of Apple and Samsung.” Raskino insists that CIOs  mull over this question: “How will distribution in my industry change by the Internet of Things?

Raskino describes IT consumerisation more like a  nuisance for IT, rather than serving as Windows security. “It’s a hygiene factor,” he says. Employees bringing their own devices (BYOD) to the work place is an aspect of IT that CIOs and IT divisions will now have to bear with.

Raskino also suggests that modern CIOs are too constricted with respect to their focus.

“Because you haven’t had a deep structural model for digitization of your industry, (superficial) level things happen instead. BYOD is analogous to the [shallow] websites you had in the 1990s,” Raskino said.

Among the many chief information officers’ Gartner has been in talks with, the prime objective is to gain a greater use of digital assets, through the concept of digitization. The analyst firm describes a host of forces, including cloud, mobile, social technologies, and big data. These forces change the rules of the IT landscape, allowing organizations to become more digitiszed, such as by utilizing big data, as well as sensor networks in order to create new business opportunities.