Top Notch Technological Priorities

Bangalore: With new technologies cropping up every other day, it is becoming a herculean task for CIOs to prioritize each technology that would be most viable for an enterprise. Moreover, what may work for a particular organization might fail to do in case of other organizations. As such, identifying the technologies that would be beneficial in the long run has become a prerequisite for CIOs, reports Patrick Thibodeau of Computerworld.

A survey conducted recently by Gartner Inc. among IT executives found that Analytics and Business Intelligence notched the top position of all the prevailing technologies in the IT sector whereas Mobile secured the second position. The survey was conducted among 2,335 CIOs worldwide comprising 45 countries and controlling IT assets worth $321 billion.

The complete list of priorities is given below along with the ranks they occupied last year:

1.    Analytics and business intelligence. (Last year's rank: 5)
2.    Mobile technologies. (Last year: 3)
3.    Cloud computing, including SaaS. (Last year: 1)
4.    Collaboration/workflow technologies. (Last year: 8)
5.    Legacy modernization.
6.    IT management. (Last year: 4)
7.    CRM
8.    ERP applications
9.    Security
10.  Virtualization. (Last year: 2)

Gartner analyst Mark McDonald stated, “Present economic conditions may tempt CIOs to force IT back into cost-cutting mode, but senior executives expect technology -- and this includes IT -- to address the tough challenges by amplifying enterprise strategies and operations.”

Interestingly, the survey also found that CFOs are playing a pivotal role in shaping up the IT as they are the ones who have taken the reigns of the investment in the IT projects from the CIOs.

John Van Decker, another analyst at Gartner was of the opinion that, “There is a message in the study that IT needs to get much closer to business. If they (CIOs) don't do that I think what you are going to see is more of the control being taken away."

Only time will tell the fate of the CIOs.