CIOs' technology plans unveiled
CIO Agenda 2009: Are you spending where they're spending?
Published: 12 March 2009 12:38 GMT by Steve Ranger
Show related articlesProtecting their IT infrastructure - and making it work a bit harder - are two key areas of focus for IT chiefs this year, silicon.com's exclusive CIO research has revealed.
Now in its fifth year, the silicon.com CIO Agenda surveys UK heads of technology on a number of areas including their business and technology strategies.
When asked which technologies and strategy areas they intended to focus on in 2009, IT directors and CIOs that responded to the survey put security top of the list (mentioned by 62 per cent), followed by virtualisation (54 per cent).
IT governance and measurement was in third place this year, rated a priority by half of respondents, while Itil was ranked at number six on the list.
The results come in contrast to 2008's silicon.com CIO Agenda 2008 survey, where IT governance took the top spot.
In 2007, mobile was the hottest topic for CIOs, although by this year that has slumped to seventh place on the list of priorities.
The specific areas of interest within security, the top CIO priority, included identity and access management, email security, and monitoring and filtering. Other security issues mentioned by IT chiefs included biometrics and data encryption.
Enterprise business applications was fourth on the list, with most emphasis given to ERP and CRM projects, while business intelligence was the fifth technology and strategy issue highlighted by the CIOs.
In the mobile space, remote and flexible working, followed by handheld devices and 3G were the technologies creating the most interest.
Outsourcing was mentioned by a quarter of the CIOs, with infrastructure the top candidate for outsourcing, followed by application development and maintenance and support.
Offshoring also got a mention in the survey, with India the country most likely to be used, followed by China.
But in the midst of the credit crunch it was perhaps a surprise to see CIOs give a low priority to open source, often seen as a means of cutting the cost of software licensing - mentioned by only one in 10 IT chiefs.
Software as a service was given a similarly low priority, along with grid and utility computing, which suggests predictions that all corporate IT will soon be moving to the cloud could be at best a little premature.
The silicon.com CIO Agenda surveyed 25 CIOs and IT directors in the UK across a range of industries in January this year.
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