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CIO Agenda: The 2007 tech shopping list
Mobile and wireless set to be hot this year...

By Andy McCue

Published: Monday 15 January 2007

What's in store for IT over the next 12 months? To find out, we polled members of silicon.com's CIO Jury about their outlook and key concerns for 2007. The results make up our third annual CIO Agenda survey. Today Andy McCue examines what's hot and what's not when it comes to the enterprise technology shopping list for the next year. Stay tuned for more results from this poll over the coming days.

Mobile and wireless technologies are top of the CIO's shopping list for 2007, according to the results of this year's exclusive CIO Agenda survey by silicon.com.

Just under two-thirds (63 per cent) of the 18 CIOs who took part in the survey said they will be investing in mobile and wireless this year, with much of that targeted around wi-fi and PDAs. The CIO Agenda respondents also said convergence and support for more flexible home and remote working are new priorities for 2007.

Last year IT governance and compliance were the top CIO spending priorities and both are still of high importance with just over half (52 per cent) looking at governance and 42 per cent looking at compliance in 2007.

A new entry on the shopping list this year is IT infrastructure library, which 47 per cent of CIOs cited as a priority. Other hot areas include voice over IP (42 per cent), customer relationship management (42 per cent), storage (37 per cent), web services (31 per cent) and business intelligence (31 per cent).

Security has again slipped down the list of priorities for 2007, with only a quarter of CIOs planning any significant investment in that area. It topped the 2005 survey but dropped to third last year.

Areas that few CIOs say they will be investing in over the next 12 months include desktop and server hardware (five per cent), RFID (five per cent), ERP (five per cent) and offshore outsourcing (10 per cent). A fifth are looking at open source in 2007 but on the server and not the desktop - which backs up the findings of a recent CIO Jury which concluded Linux still isn't ready for mainstream business desktop use.

Another new entry on the 2007 shopping list is service-oriented architecture (SOA), although the CIOs said SOA was the most over-hyped technology of 2006.

Other over-hyped technologies last year included web 2.0 and Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, with Vista tipped to be the most-hyped technology over the next 12 months, along with SOA and software as a service.

CIO Agenda respondent Les Boggia, head of IT at insurance firm Carole Nash, said: "In 2007, the hype will mainly be around new MS products - Vista in particular - and when should you upgrade. The first people may take steps to implement and no doubt we'll hear how this goes."

Despite the media hype frenzy around web 2.0 many CIO Agenda respondents admitted it will actually have an impact on the corporate IT department in 2007.

Gavin Whatrup, group IT director at Creston, said: "Consumer tech will have to be integrated further, and support models adapted to cope."

Graham Benson, IT director at Play.com's IT operation the Web Factory, said: "People will need to challenge traditional thinking."

Stay tuned for more of silicon.com's exclusive CIO Agenda series this week when we look at CIO priorities, and how IT budgets are shaping up for 2007.