Fifty-three percent of CIOs in Hong Kong underline their key focus in increasing profitability and performance through IT, said IDC Wednesday.

According to current results of IDC's ongoing survey Asia/Pacific Dynamic IT Benchmark 2009, majority of CIOs in the region, despite reduced IT budget, place high priority on reviewing IT service and cost alignment with business alongside optimizing existing IT infrastructure.

Till date, survey results have also revealed the following key findings about CIOs in Hong Kong:

* Hong Kong CIOs have put much focus on enhancing partner and customer communication in 2009.

* 30 percent of the Hong Kong CIOs interviewed indicated that they will focus their corporate IT refresh strategy for 2009 on service-oriented architecture (SOA).

* Over 40 percent of the Hong Kong CIOs interviewed have plans to move major applications to flexible on-demand web services in an SOA environment.

* 63.6 percent of the CIOs are preparing to outsource and only 21.2 percent of the CIOs have disagreed to host their IT infrastructure and business data in a third-party environment indicating that CIOs are opening up to newer IT business models like cloud computing, software as a service operating model.

"We are at an interesting juncture", said Dr. Patrick Chan, chief technology advisor for IDC's Asia/Pacific Emerging Technology Council. "As a result of the financial downturn, corporations are under mounting pressures to invest only in IT that can help their businesses save costs and grow at the same time. As a result, CIOs today have very challenging roles to play. They need to balance savings against IT investments in order to achieve optimal growth for their organizations."

Patrick likens CIOs to catalysts as majority is now given the added role of aiding business growth and managing cost in a big way. "It's imperative for CIOs to understand emerging trends in IT as well as the business directions so as to align their organizations on the right pathway to a better future," he noted.