CIO, make 2010 your year of success

David M Williams
Tuesday, 22 December 2009 07:49

IT Industry - Market

A new year is about to begin. The worst of the global recession appears over and technology leaders ought to steel themselves now to make 2010 a year where technology is put back on the radar. Make your strategies count with these seven steps.

This year Chief Information Officers and other senior technology managers felt the vacuum as their influence was sucked away in light of tight fiscal controls imposed across enterprises.

The argument of whether IT should legitimately and disparagingly be labelled a cost centre is for another time; what matters now is that for much of 2009 the Finance team held the reigns.

In February I gave recommendations to retaining relevancy during a recession. I advocated forgetting technical programmes with obscure payoffs – like migrating your fleet to Office 2007 – and instead concentrating on aligning technology with business goals and in focusing on management information systems; turning the vast amount of raw company data into meaningful figures that clearly and timely show how the company’s bottom line is going.

Now we have come through to the other end of the year the pressure has alleviated and 2010 offers the opportunity to put longer-term IT strategy back in your sights.

Yet, things are going to be different. Just like the after-effects of the so-called millennium bug a decade ago hurt confidence in IT spending so too business executives will want justifiable and quantifiable benefits to any new project this time around.

To succeed in your technical programmes CIOs need to prepare and plan. Here are seven questions to work through to make your programmes a success.