2011 State of the CIO: IT Departments Are Fueling Company Growth Through Strategic Technology Investments

CIO — While there’s no free-wheeling IT spending going on (unless you’re hiding that information), our annual State of the CIO research confirms the rumor: The Great Recession has indeed abated.

Heading into 2011, many CIOs are investing in projects to improve staff productivity, make business processes more efficient and promote innovation. These transformational and strategic activities signal that the retrenchment that ruled the past two years is, thankfully, over. CIOs we interviewed say that data center redesigns no longer simmer on the back burner. Mobile experiments are moving to production. iPad requisitions are being signed. Renewal has begun.

Further proof: That urgent push—“panic” is such an ugly word—to involve every single employee in acquiring and retaining customers also shows signs of dying down. In 2010, a hefty 25 percent of CIOs said that that kind of customer engagement would be their most significant business accomplishment for the year; this year, it’s 19 percent of the 729 heads of IT we surveyed.

CIO — While there’s no free-wheeling IT spending going on (unless you’re hiding that information), our annual State of the CIO research confirms the rumor: The Great Recession has indeed abated.

Heading into 2011, many CIOs are investing in projects to improve staff productivity, make business processes more efficient and promote innovation. These transformational and strategic activities signal that the retrenchment that ruled the past two years is, thankfully, over. CIOs we interviewed say that data center redesigns no longer simmer on the back burner. Mobile experiments are moving to production. iPad requisitions are being signed. Renewal has begun.

Further proof: That urgent push—“panic” is such an ugly word—to involve every single employee in acquiring and retaining customers also shows signs of dying down. In 2010, a hefty 25 percent of CIOs said that that kind of customer engagement would be their most significant business accomplishment for the year; this year, it’s 19 percent of the 729 heads of IT we surveyed.

Of course, CIOs must always understand customers and provide the technology to build relationships with the people who keep their companies in business, says Joel Schwalbe, CIO of CNL Financial Group, a private investment management firm. But the call for all hands on deck has quieted. “What we are focused on is which customers bring the most value to our company versus getting more customers,” Schwalbe adds. “That’s a different perspective.”

Technology shifts, meanwhile, are remaking the CIO career trajectory. Our survey shows that in three to five years, more CIOs expect to have responsibility for security and risk management. That’s in part because enterprise projects in cloud and mobile computing now prompt CIOs to weigh which critical internal and customer data to keep in-house and which to store in cloud systems, says Jamie Page, director of information services at Slumberland, a privately held furniture retailer. CIOs also have to figure out how best to protect data, no matter where it resides, when customers and employees access it via smartphones, he says. “You have to be constantly evaluating security,” he says. CIOs love to grab control of anything that gives them the heebie-jeebies.

IT groups must remain disciplined as the recovery takes hold, says Wayne Shurts, CIO of Supervalu (SVU), a $40.6 billion supermarket company. “Every hour of a colleague’s time is valuable. You have to use them in the most productive way,” he says. “The recession reminded us, if we got a little fat and happy, how important that discipline is.”