Australian CIOs want to flex their visionary muscles in businesses

Stan Beer
Thursday, 13 November 2008 13:22

IT Industry - Market

Australia’s Chief Information Officers want to be recognised as business strategists rather than just the managers who look after the IT systems. At least that seems to be the message coming out of a new survey.

For a long time the CIO has been viewed by many as a sort of junior member of the CXO regime, somewhat less senior than the CEO, COO and CFO roles. However, with the continued rise of the importance of technology as a business enabler and differentiator, the role of the CIO may be changing.

According to an EMC survey compiled and analysed by independent research firm Hydrasight, CIOs want to be more involved with the vision setting and business strategy of the organisations they work for in the next 12 months.

The respondents from an invited panel of CIOs from Australia’s top 200 corporations believed they needed to be more involved in vision setting, organisational strategy and communication, while also providing advice to the business on technology trends and directions, board reporting, as well as IT employee sourcing and retention.

“The survey results clearly indicate that CIOs see themselves as providing greater levels of vision and technology strategy to the business,” said John Brand, research director for independent IT industry analyst firm Hydrasight who analysed the survey results.

Brand observed that some CIO’s believe they must actively and directly drive business process improvement within their organisation and that there is a desire to increasingly participate in driving strategy and change.

EMC said the results reflected what it is seeing in the marketplace with the exponential growth of information demanding that executives take a more information-centric approach as a crucial enabler in creating value and delivering revenue growth.

"The results of this survey show how the landscape of business is changing and how CIOs are emerging as corporate strategists," said David Webster, President, EMC Australia & New Zealand.

"In today's exploding digital universe, information is currency and organizations are looking to their CIOs to know where all the information is coming from and how it can be used to save money, increase value and mitigate risk - today's CIO has become the CFO of information."

The survey also found that CIOs believed that application development and integration were still significant areas of focus for achieving cost reductions and securing overall value, while surprisingly there was less interest in knowledge, intelligence, and analytics. The hot areas of technology were enterprise architecture, hosted and or managed services, and ‘transformational outsourcing’.