Xantus launches its latest research into the skills and leadership challenges faced by today’s CIOs. A survey of more than 50 CIOs was conducted and Xantus also gathered together a panel of leading experts to explore the findings.
Highlights from the report include:
Budgets set to rise, but resources stretched
It comes as no surprise that both the recession and recovery have created new challenges for IT organisations but with more than 70% of CIOs expecting their budgets to increase this year their resources will be stretched. The increasing pace of technology change and the risks around data security complicate matters yet further.
“Risk and regulatory controls have to be at or near the top of every corporate IT agenda now”.
Pete Stafford, Nationwide
Technology, in its place
A tentative economic recovery, multiple goals and other challenges have implications for the way the IT function is organised, resourced and run. Fewer than 50% of CIOs believe their functions are fully prepared to support future growth.
Whatever the aims of the business it’s clear that a large number of CIOs (43%) believe that the application of new technology will support its goals. The expert panel put this finding into context; the ability to exploit technology’s potential depends on changing the relationship with the rest of the business.
I don’t call my team the IT team, otherwise the rest of the business will pigeon-hole them as technicians. I prefer the term ‘business systems and technology’ because it makes it clear that the latter is an adjunct and it makes it clear where our priority is’.
Mike Bell, Kingfisher
Recentralisation
After a decade in which most IT functions have been de-centralised, allowing individual business units autonomy about which systems they need, the function needs to adopt an informed, yet questioning approach.
“We have to work more in tandem with the business; some barriers still need to be broken down”.
Pete Stafford, Nationwide
The cost of the wrong skills
The IT function of the future needs the skills which are hardest to find. 96% of CIOs said they need to strengthen the business relationship management skills of their staff and 93% say that these skills are difficult to find.
This is important as having the wrong skills can affect performance – 52% of CIOs say that this can be up to 10%, 41% say it is more.
“Most IT organisations need much stronger skills in their ‘front tier’, the part of their business that interfaces with the rest of the organisation”.
David Lister, National GridIT strategy and architecture skills will be crucial going forwards according to more than 69% of CIOs.“For a long time, we’ve had an environment in which each investment programme has been managed separately, but we’re now trying to merge those into the context of what we want to do in the future. We want a single view of the answer to this question and need strategy and architecture skills to help us build it”.
Rob Fraser, Sainsbury’s
To download a full copy of the report, Click here to download the report>>>
