Recently, IBM conducted their first Global Chief Information Officer Study. For this study, 2598 CIOs from 78 countries, 19 different industries and organizations of all sizes were interviewed face-to-face and the results of the survey have been released in September 2009.
Does it come as a surprise that the vast majority (83%) see business intelligence and analytics as their top priority for the next 12 months? Not really if you consider how important timely and accurate information is in this type of economy to not only gain a competitive advantage, but sometimes simply to survive as a business.
The study is titled "The New Voice of the CIO" and reveals that CIOs are playing now an increasingly strategic role and are acting as visionary leaders and drivers of innovation and overall company success. CIOs are currently re-defining their role.
The voice of the CIO is being heard in new ways as they are increasingly recognized as valuable members of the senior executive team. And successful CIOs are now much more actively engaged in defining strategies, enabling flexibility and changing and solving business problems, not only IT related problems.
Sure enough, reducing IT costs is part of their business, but also mitigating enterprise risks and leveraging automation to lower costs in all areas of the company. In addition, helping to improve the company's overall performance is a very important part of the CIO's role. With an improved business intelligence and analytics solution, he can provide crucial information to all management levels of the business, said Pat Toole, CIO of IBM.
Apart from data analytics as their highest priority, the study revealed that data reliability and security are of high importance. 71% of all interviewed CIOs will increase their effort in these two areas. Other areas of high importance for the CIOs were Virtualization (76%) and Customer and Partner collaboration (68%).
In economies like we are in at the moment, CIOs are facing a dilemma: How can they reduce costs while improving services? How can they balance the need to influence business strategies with the need to provide top notch IP support?
So, using IT to produce greater business value is vital, bundled with an ongoing focus on lower cost and higher efficiency. This is why an improved business intelligence solution combined with a great analytics tool with excellent visualization is so important.
