CIOs: Are you ready to be a hero?

CIOs need to be "decisive and resourceful" this year as they battle to squeeze the most out of stagnant IT budgets.

Analyst group Gartner calculates that IT spending will be flat, according to its survey of 1,527 CIOs worldwide who represent more than $138bn in corporate and public sector IT spending. The survey found no growth in IT budgets across organisations in North America and Europe, with slight budget increases seen in Latin America and a slight decrease in Asia/Pacific.

Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP, said IT chiefs are being faced with global economic conditions that have not existed for more than 50 years: "This environment is reflected in IT budgets, priorities and strategies as one third of CIOs reported no change in their budget from 2008, while 46 per cent reported a slight increase, and 21 per cent reported a cut in IT budgets," he said in a statement.

McDonald said CIOs need to be "decisive and resourceful" in building an effective company.

"Leading organisations recognise the seriousness of economic conditions, but they are not paralysed by them. Their leaders have confidence in their ability to use IT to achieve results," he added.

The Gartner survey found that the top ten technology priorities listed by CIOs are:

• Business intelligence
• Enterprise applications (ERP, CRM and others)
• Servers and storage technologies (virtualisation)
• Legacy application modernisation
• Collaboration technologies
• Networking, voice and data communications
• Technical infrastructure
• Security technologies
• Service-oriented applications and architecture
• Document management

Gartner said that while CIOs will invest in technologies beyond their core infrastructure, the focus of spending has shifted from adopting emerging tech to using IT to get the most out of the business: for example, boosting expenditure on business intelligence to enable better insight into how a company's sales arm is performing.

McDonald said that while some critics might say that CIO technology priorities could be more ambitious, "modest" resources requiring close management mean it's understandable IT bosses are looking to squeeze more value from what they have before making significant purchases.

Gartner said CIOs need to focus on improving business process and doing the "first things faster," as changing economic conditions make large projects irrelevant.

"CIOs need to apply a prioritisation process to their schedule and recognise that other important priorities can wait. They need to place greater emphasis on the schedule (when) rather than the priorities (why)," said the analyst group said.