The CIO shopping list

Pressure to justify IT budgets and get better value for money from tech investment are the key issues driving tech spending over the next year, according to silicon.com's exclusive CIO Agenda 2008 survey.

IT governance was cited as the top technology and strategy area they will be investing in during 2008 by almost two-thirds (65 per cent) of the 20 CIOs who responded to the fourth annual CIO Agenda Survey.

Linking in with the governance theme is IT infrastructure library (Itil), which remains high on the CIO agenda, with 40 per cent of respondents putting it on their 2008 to-do list.

Last year's top tech spending area was mobile and wireless, which slips down to number two this year - with 60 per cent of CIOs investing in it.

Wi-fi is the hottest area within mobile and wireless, followed by "flexible/remote working" technology.

Not surprisingly security, enterprise hardware and software also remain big spending areas for CIOs in 2008.

Half of the CIO Agenda respondents said they will be investing in virtualisation and just over a third (35 per cent) are spending on server technologies.

On the software side investment is dominated by enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), with just over a third of CIOs spending on both those areas in 2008.

A quarter of CIOs said they will be outsourcing this year - mainly on the infrastructure, rather than application development/maintenance side - but none said they will be offshoring.

Despite the hype, service oriented architecture (SOA) (20 per cent) and business intelligence (20 per cent) remain low down the tech shopping priorities.

CIO Agenda respondent Steve Williams, head of ICT for Sunderland City Council, said: "I suspect that SOA will deliver brilliantly for some organisations but fail the majority."

Bottom of the tech shopping list for CIOs this year are open source, grid/utility computing and RFID.

Echoing the cool response by businesses to its launch, Microsoft's Windows Vista topped the list of most-hyped technologies in 2007 by a clear distance - as it did the year before - followed by utility computing, the iPhone and SOA.

The main prediction by CIOs for the most-hyped technology in 2008 is green IT, followed by web 2.0 and social networking, m-commerce and - look away now Microsoft - Vista yet again.