At the recent IDG CIO summit in Sydney, Logicalis polled attendees around a series of IT related issues. What follows is a summary of the results from polling over 70 CIOs from some of the leading organisations in Australia.
Overall, there is a significant shift towards a more strategic agenda that emphasises IT’s role as an enabler and innovator rather than a deliverer of low cost efficient infrastructure. Alignment with business goals and the enablement of innovation is the leading priority for this audience. Interestingly, providing a better workplace IT experience comes in second ahead of improving efficiency and reducing costs (which takes out third place).
It seems the pendulum that swings between cost reduction and efficiency on one hand and innovation and strategic alignment on the other, is for now at least, swinging back in favour of the latter. Perhaps it’s a sign that the worst of the economic woes of the GFC are behind us and CIOs are looking to the future and an upward growth trajectory - or simply that there is less and less cost to be taken out of IT infrastructure with much of the hard work being already done.
The evidence that the era of big data is upon us is also present, with the implementation of analytics and business intelligence also high on the priority list, close behind cost reduction and efficiency.
With regard to cloud the overwhelming majority of respondents (95%) consider cloud as an enabler of greater agility and cost reduction. Within that there were three main drivers identified – all of equal importance:
- Reduction of capex
- Improved IT Service levels
- Improved availability/DR/Backup
Despite the near universal acceptance that cloud plays an important role in improving agility and driving down costs, CIOs only rank cloud at a 6 out of 10 in terms of developing a cloud strategy and an even lower 5 out of 10 in effectiveness. There's a large "spread" of responses, especially around the importance of having a cloud strategy, reflecting very different rates of cloud adoption. It seems there is a good deal of work still to be done to extract the undoubted benefits of a well-designed cloud strategy. If you would like to read our "How To" article on the 3 essential steps successful Cloud migration please download this complimentary article.
Improved collaboration within the work environment was ranked a seven out of ten in terms of importance, but only a six out of ten in terms of effectiveness, possibly reflecting the many firms who have experimented with BYOD technologies and realised that, in fact, developing an effective approach to mobile technologies is more challenging that it may seem.
