Survey Results: Top 3 focus areas for a CIO

The survey on the same topic was concluded last week and the response was good from all quarters from world with most of the votes coming from North America this time. In addition of sharing the results, let me also share few comments from the participants.

Mike Cuppet said that the top focus areas for a CIO depend on factors like:

• What technology enablers/tools/systems do we need to provide to the business in the next 1-3 years
• What disruptive technologies (social media, IaaS/SaaS/PaaS, cloud, etc.) exist where we need to define a plan for managing/not utilizing
• How can we better manage and secure our data
• What should our investments/cost structure look like in 2-3 years

He mentioned that the CIO and his team should be working on their objectives like:

1. Working to reduce TCO across the infrastructure
2. Improving product delivery quality
3. Increasing team member capabilities
4. Meeting governance standards
5. Decommissioning non-value added technologies
6. Decreasing power consumption/getting to be "greener"

Similarly, Denis Montillet's list included points like:

• Pressure to Improve IT Efficiency and Cost
• Assume security and privacy for IT operations and data archive
• Challenge staffing and re-organization

Kyle Bigelow and Eric Pennente menitioned similar points but supported them very well. These were:

• ROI for existing infrastructure and upgrades that will have a fast ROI
• Overhead reduction and efficiency
• Mobility

Coming to the survey results, total number of votes I got the poll were: 163 in a period of 18 days and as I said earlier, most of the responses were from North America. The topmost priority that came out from the poll was Business Intelligence Solutions which got maximum percentage of votes at 23.8%. This was closely followed by focus areas like "Facilitate collaboration with customer/supplier" getting 20.6% votes and "Improve visibility across supply chain" getting 15.9% .

Other important priorities for a CIO in current times, in order of higher priority to lower, are:

• Reduce cost through automation
• Modernization of Legacy systems
• Build and retain IT support team
• Improve data security
• Deploy control and tracking mechanism
• Implement/Upgrade ERP 

Rest of the focus areas did not get enough votes to be counted among the real priorities of a CIO these days.