CIO Agenda, part 1: The 2006 IT shopping list

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 2006. The results make up our second 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.

IT governance and compliance have replaced security as the number one item on the technology shopping list for IT bosses in 2006, according to silicon.com's second annual CIO Agenda survey.

The survey quizzed 12 members of silicon.com's CIO Jury IT user panel to find out their outlook for 2006 IT budgets, spending priorities and the ongoing evolution of the CIO role.

More than 80 per cent of the CIO survey respondents said they will be focusing on IT governance in the next 12 months, highlighting the increased pressure on CIOs to benchmark and measure whether IT projects really are delivering value for money. Compliance was the second most important area and now appears to have become a routine fixture on the IT chief's list of responsibilities.

Both pipped IT security, which topped last year's list, although email security and monitoring and filtering technologies remain hot issues for two-thirds of respondents.

Evidence from this year's CIO Agenda survey suggests IT budgets continue to be squeezed and, with the emphasis on cutting costs, it is no surprise to see outsourcing and offshoring featuring prominently on CIOs' 'to do' lists for 2006.

Almost half of respondents said they will be doing some outsourcing in 2006 and a quarter will be offshoring IT work. But one CIO said in-sourcing - bringing an outsourced function back in-house - which has emerged as a new trend this year will also be on the agenda for 2006.

Some of the biggest surprises are in what is not on the list. Only one CIO will be looking at open source in 2006 and that will be on the server and not the desktop. In fact open source featured high on the list of technologies CIOs believe were most over-hyped during the last 12 months.

RFID also continues to be over-hyped for most IT bosses and just one of the CIO Agenda respondents plans to spend on the controversial tracking tags next year.

Other over-hyped technologies in the last 12 months included mobile computing, service oriented architecture (SOA), grid computing and voice over IP (VoIP) - although half of respondents said they will be focusing on VoIP in 2006. Mobile video, utility computing and WiMax round out the list of technologies CIOs believe will be most over-hyped in 2006.

CIOs also say mass-market consumer technologies from the iPod to Google are having some impact on enterprise IT decision-makers. At silicon.com's CIO Forum event in London earlier this year British Airways CIO Paul Coby said IT chiefs need to be thinking now about how these new disruptive technologies will impact their business, staff and customers.

CIO Agenda respondent Gavin Whatrup, group IT director at advertising agency Delany Lund Knox Warren & Partners, said: "The merging of 'the gadget' into the business sphere, such as the iPod, iPaq, multi-function mobile phones or anything that connects into a PC that may have a business benefit has caused issues in 2005, and will continue into 2006. Policies will have to be extended to include the more intrusive technologies, or assign budget to allow the business to control them."

Core IT spend will continue to be devoted to existing investment in huge ERP systems, web services, storage and hardware but mobile and wireless remains something of a fringe activity for many CIOs - although a third said they will be investing in wi-fi, 3G and PDAs.

More interesting are the new areas that CIOs will be spending their hard-fought budgets on. Grid computing is a new entry on the 2006 technology shopping list but Kirk Downey, CTO at Centrica, stressed this is "not the dreamland variety - more virtualisation".

Read the rest of our exclusive CIO Agenda series: part two on the outlook for IT budgets and part three on the main challenges CIOs face in 2006.