CIOs now spending double their time on business priorities, strategy: Survey

The Society for Information Management (SIM), an association of more than 4,500 CIOs and other IT leaders, has released their 2016 IT Trends Study. This year’s study, which included responses from 1,218 members from 785 organisations, with total revenues of nearly $5 trillion and $250 billion in 2015 IT spending, reveals significant changes in IT leadership and direction. “The bottom line,” said Leon Kappelman, lead researcher of the study, “is that senior IT leadership is focusing their attention and resources on being more pragmatic, holistic and business customer-focused. This is a very important and positive change, which bodes well for the whole economy.” [caption id=“attachment_2235888” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Thinkstock[/caption] New entrants to the top-ten most worrisome IT issues are those that focus on making IT more responsive to the organisation, while the four items no longer identified are things IT cannot really control, the study stated. New entrants include IT agility and IT credibility, replacing velocity of business and technology change. “This signals a very realistic and pragmatic change and is likely to result in significant improvements to IT and its ability to enable the business.” This year the study also examined the IT skills shortage, which has been a top concern of IT executives since the inception of the study nearly four decades ago. The examination of both technical and soft skills revealed a very high demand for architects, analysts, designers and others who are able to bridge the communication chasm between IT and the business, but in the context of the organisation as a whole.   According to the study, CIOs are now spending double their time on business priorities, strategy and architecture (from 8.1 percent in 2014 to 16.2 percent in 2015). This is where CIOs spend most of their time, followed by forming IT strategy (11.9 percent) and IT operations (8 percent). Further, the most common measures of CIO performance are IT’s contribution to business strategy (35.5 percent); availability/up-time (34 percent); IT user/ customer satisfaction (31.9 percent), satisfaction of the customers of the business (30.3 percent); and value of IT to the business (29.6 percent).