An international survey conducted by Logicalis Group holds a warning for CIOs worldwide. The study indicates CIOs must act now to take on a more strategic role or risk being pushed aside by line-of-business managers who are making increasing numbers of technology buying decisions.
While more than 75 percent of CIOs and IT directors wish to spend more time on strategy, more than half surveyed currently spend 70 percent or more of their time on the day-to-day management of technology. Even more telling, 80 percent spend at least half of their time on low-value, non-strategic activities.
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Sixty percent of CIO respondents agreed that line-of-business managers will gain more power over IT decision making in the next three to five years – a trend driven by the growing availability of externally available cloud services and expectations for technology and application consumerization.
The following were identified by CIOs as ways to play a more strategic role within their organizations:
- Streamlining and optimizing their technology infrastructure as vital to free their time for more strategic goals
- Consolidating the use of managed services
- Handing more day-to-day management activities over to specialized managed services providers
Creating a services-defined enterprise in which IT and line-of-business managers are working toward shared priorities is now a crucial mandate for the CIOs surveyed. It is clear that CIOs plan to focus their teams on delivering an IT experience comparable with external service providers and will also engage with services partners to assist them in achieving the service maturity and agility necessary to compete for internal business in the coming years.
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