Beverley Head
Tuesday, 23 March 2010 15:08
Business IT -
Technology
Page 1 of 2
Australian and New Zealand chief information officers – Government included – are lagging their international peers when it comes to exploring new age technologies such as cloud computing and Web 2.0.
Announcing the results of its 2010 CIO Survey today, industry analyst Gartner said that while international CIOs placed cloud computing and web 2.0 as the second and third most strategic technologies after virtualisation, in Australia these were relegated to 5th and 6th slots.
Linda Price, group vice president of executive programs in this region, said that in Australia networking and data storage and management ranked two and three on the strategic technologies list, which were “rather pedestrian” by comparison. Steve Bittinger, Gartner research director, added that he had been disappointed that the Commonwealth Government’s data centre plans, released yesterday had contained no mention of its intentions with regard to cloud computing - in stark comparison to other international governments.
Price described 2010 as a year of IT transition as businesses journeyed from recession to recovery. Internationally IT budgets were tipped to grow 1.23 per cent.
While Australian CIOs had forecast a more robust 3.26 per cent average budget growth, that was still down on the “high 6s” being predicted in Asia Pacific she said.
Price said that internationally there were signs of a move from efficiency to productivity and from heavyweight to lighter weight technologies. Australian and New Zealand CIOs however were “not as enamoured of the light weight technologies” as were their overseas peers according to Price.
Where ANZ CIOs and their international peers are in lockstep is that they share the top two business priorities – namely improving business processes and cutting enterprise cost during 2010. But over the coming three years most CIOs expected the cost focus to recede as organisations sought to extract more value from their data through information analytics, and use IT to attract and retain customers.
