Business performance will dictate IT salaries in 2011: Gartner

IT leaders can increasingly expect to have their pay tied to the financial performance of their organisation, according to Gartner.

Speaking at the Gartner Symposium 2010 in Sydney, Gartner’s Nick Jones said 2011 would see a major shift in technology priorities toward delivering IT projects which enabled business growth.

“Business opportunity is the important thing, the number one thing driving the selection of new technologies,” Jones said. “A related question … is looking for technologies which provide some kind of business differentiation.

“The bottom line… is that increasingly technology selection is a business issue and a business opportunity it is not just something that the IT department does.

According to Jones this was of particular concern for CIOs as tying business performance to salary was an increasing phenomenon.

“We expect in the future we expect that CIOs will increasingly be compensated on corporate revenue so there is a really powerful incentive to find technologies that deliver business growth as it will mean more money in your pay packet.”

As reported by CIO Commonwealth Bank CIO, Michael Harte, is one of the better know examples of the move to performance-based pay.

In September, the bank’s annual report revealed that Harte’s pay packet received a boost of $1.4 million in 2009, mainly due to long-term incentive payments.

“Everyone across the Enterprise Service team is measured by a 40 per cent customer satisfaction KPI — if our customers are not happy with the reliability of a system, ease of use and access, richness of features and function, then our staff will be penalised,” Harte said at the time.

Harte has also gone on the record confirming that his pay packet had taken a hit due to a Netbank outage.

“Yes, it affected mine, and it affected a lot of people in this room (Tim Whiteley, executive general manager, Dave Curran executive general manager, Nick Holdsworth executive general manager) and will affect us increasingly as we have failures in software, hardware, the network and failures to deliver reliable and effective service,” Harte said.

Commenting on the top 10 strategic technologies for 2011, Jones said 2010 priorities Green IT, data centre reshaping, activity monitoring, and virtualisation for greater availability, had fallen off the list.

In the year ahead mobile applications – particularly with the imminent arrival of a multitude of tablet PCs, social computing, context, fabric-based computing and ubiquitous computing would be major themes.

Cloud brokers — an intermediary between cloud service providers and consumers — would also increasingly merge in 2011, Jones said.

“What we are seeing is services emerging on top of the clouds to offer other levels of service,” he said. “So, you can get things like hosted Ruby services which run on top of Amazon EC2.

“In a cloud sense you can get broker services which implement things like security and management, maybe insurance. You can have brokers who do things like cost control which can arbitrage services form multiple cloud providers, for example.”