What is #1 priority for Indian CIOs in 2014?

A new survey by EY-CIOKlub shows the ever-increasing confidence of CIOs in enterprise IT tools and disruptive technologies that are shaping products, processes and organisations today. According to an annual Enterprise IT trends and investment survey, titled ‘Focusing on the fundamentals’, IT priorities and investments in India have shown a healthy trend and have not been significantly impacted despite the uncertainty in the political environment over the election outcome, , the instabilities of the market and the changing regulatory landscape.

“The winds of change” are blowing in 2014 with CIOs being optimistic and looking at making significant investments for the development of IT and new solutions to achieve business expansion and customer satisfaction," Samiron Ghoshal, partner & leader, IT advisory services, EY said.
[caption id=“attachment_81790” align=“alignleft” width=“300”]  Image: Thinkstock[/caption]
Evolving digital technologies - including social media, enterprise mobility, data analytics and cloud, commonly known as SMAC - are rapidly emerging as disruptive forces for organisations across all industries. Majority of CIOs are focusing on the fundamentals of SMAC, ascertaining that they get them right before they move on to more futuristic technologies.

More from Biztech

Future Group - Reliance Retail Deal approved by CCI RBI ban on cryptocurrencies takes effect; prohibition could force investors to tap the black market

As per the survey results, there is a marked difference in adoption levels for each one. Cloud computing and IT consolidation are seen as the forerunners in this race with nearly 56 percent of respondents indicating it as their number 1 priority for the upcoming year; Business intelligence, analytics and big data come second at 34 percent; enterprise mobility is at 25 percent; and social media is at 9 percent.

An interesting outlier, which typically gains considerable interest, is information security with a share of 18 percent respondent votes for top priority in FY14-15. Security has consistently taken CIOs’ mindshare as one of the key priorities for the last six years.

“The above statistics lends us to believe that the true acronym, in line with the adoption scale, should be CAMSS - (cloud, analytics, enterprise mobility, social media and security),” EY stated.

Devendra Parulekar, partner, IT risk and assurance, EY, believed, “Given CAMSS’ influence on the future prospects of the CIO’s role, CIOs will need to enhance their executive skills, have better business connects to be ready to transform the business using the technological advances that will come with these winds of change.”

According to the survey, more than 45 percent of the respondents feel that security and privacy concerns outweigh their focus on cloud. This is evident from the survey results where 23 percent respondents shy away from cloud due to their lack of understanding on cloud architecture and deployment models and 25 percent are deterred due to lack of a global information security standard for cloud service providers.

In such an environment, it was not surprising that while big data was attracting significant attention from the CIOs, there was a clear reluctance in adopting big data technologies (only 11 percent of the respondents indicated big data investments).

In sharp contrast, 42 percent respondents have indicated focus on adopting embedded BI techniques and 30 percent on adopting advanced analytics (predictive and statistical).

It is believed that CIOs need to build a strong strategy around the implementation and roll out of enterprise mobility technology. 25 percent of the respondents have marked enterprise mobility as their number one IT transformation priority for 2014-15. Amongst these, 50 percent of the organisations have revenue in excess of Rs.10 billion and have indicated an increase in the IT budget for the year. On the other hand, 47 percent have said that they are either considering or will consider using this technology for management reporting and performance measurement in the near future.

As seen in the IT transformation agenda, social media is getting a place on the CIO agenda, but yet to gain importance in the CAMSS digital technologies. Only 9 percent of respondents have chosen it as their top priority for the year. However, as seen in survey results, approximately 30 percent of the respondents plan to introduce and approximately 15 percent respondents are evaluating introduction of social media platform in their organisations during the next year.

The survey highlights compliance with regulatory requirements, cost savings and risk mitigation amongst the lowest three priorities for the CIOs.

However, this varies slightly from industry to industry. Enhanced customer experience and compliance with regulatory requirements is marginally more important for banking and financial services and technology sectors, while infrastructure, industrial and consumer products sectors are leaning toward internal process efficiencies and agility. In technology, media and telecommunications 33 percent of the CIOs surveyed, voted for enhanced customer experience, 26 percent for internal process efficiency and agility and 22 percent elected innovation to drive competitive advantage. Whereas, in financial services sector a majority, 29 perecnt voted for innovation to drive competitive advantage, 25 percent for risk mitigation and 21 percent believe in enhanced customer experience. CIOs of infrastructure, industrial and consumer products industry valued internal process efficiency and agility as top priority with 26percent votes, while 19 percent selected enhanced customer experience and another 26 percent voted for innovation to drive competitive advantage.

The survey also observes interesting trends in the IT risk universe of organisations whereby majority of organisations (65 percent) have chosen continuous availability of critical IT resources as one of the two top risks. Only 39 percent of respondents think that macroeconomic uncertainties will impact their IT investments and priorities, whereas 72 percent of respondents believe business expansion will drive IT investments.

“All in all, this year’s survey brings good tidings for the Indian CIO with an optimistic outlook, interesting trends and a view towards their evolving role in the future,” EY claimed.