Mobility, BI top priorities for ANZ CIOs: Gartner

Australia and New Zealand chief information officers are set to increase mobile technologies and business intelligence (BI) implementations in 2012 as enterprise use of tablets and analytics increases, according to an annual global Gartner survey.

The Executive Programs 2012 CIO Agenda survey was conducted with 132 CIOs from Australia and New Zealand during the fourth quarter of 2011.

In-depth: How to create a successful mobile project.

BI climbed from position seven on the technology priority list in 2010 to number two in 2012 as CIOs revealed they were combining analytics with other technologies to create new capabilities such as analytics with mobility for use by field sales staff.

Gartner vice-president, Andy Rowsell-Jones, said that BI has had a chequered history in the annual CIO survey. “Is it new ideas, new tools, or the triumph of hope over experience that has propelled BI back into the limelight? We will find out over the course of the year,” he said in a statement.

Networking, voice and data communications were also high on the technology implementation list due to the rollouts of the National Broadband Network (NBN) and New Zealand’s Ultrafast Broadband network (UFB).

However, Cloud computing and virtualization were deemed to be less of a priority for CIOs and slipped from the first two spots last year to places three and five this year.

Turning to IT budgets, the survey found that ANZ CIOs view governance, compliance, regulation and security as the biggest barriers to IT, above the lack of IT budget and resources. Rowsell-Jones said in a statement that this was part due ANZ CIOs having more money to spend than global counterparts, but still must spend wisely.

CIOs in Australia and New Zealand reported an average budget increase of 1.3 per cent over 2011, higher than the 0.5 per cent worldwide average increase.

The survey also found that the current tenure of CIOs in ANZ averages 3.8 years, compared to the global average of 4.6 years. Twenty four per cent of ANZ CIOs report to the CFO in their organisation, ahead of the global average of 21 per cent.

Attracting new customers and increasing enterprise growth topped the business priorities list for ANZ CIOs.

”Despite the doom and gloom, there continues to be nuggets of good news in the survey data. They show enterprises haven’t given up; they are still fighting for new customers and revenue opportunities,” Rowsell-Jones said in a statement.

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