CIOs struggling with perception of IT value and compliance

Pro

20 October 2011

A new survey from Deloitte of Irish CIOs paints a picture of beleaguered officers struggling with the burden of regulatory compliance, frozen or shrinking budgets and losing the battle to prove that IT adds value to the business.

The third annual CIO survey found that only 31% of CIOs believe that their organisations perceive IT as adding value to the business, down 7% on last year.

Despite a swing of 15% toward stable or rising budgets, some 45% still expect a budget decrease. A minor 15% expect their IT budgets to rise by between 11 and 30%.

In terms of CIO priorities, regulatory compliance was the top prediction last year, and this is borne out in the 2011 results, leading IT cost reduction, consolidation and security.

"It is encouraging to see the continued stabilisation in IT budgets. However, it is clear that IT/business alignment has been victim of a relentless focus on IT cost reduction and harsh cost cutting measures over the last few years," Harry Goddard, partner, Consulting, Deloitte. "With businesses operating in an ever-increasingly competitive and fast moving environment, and public sector restructuring urgently required, the CIO needs to squeeze value from limited resources by adopting ‘guerrilla’ tactics. Without the budgets and headcounts of years past, the ‘guerrilla’ CIO must fully leverage ‘game-changing’ technologies such as cloud computing and enterprise mobility."

Despite these suggestions for game changing technologies, enterprise mobility and cloud computing came ninth and eleventh respectively in the CIO priority list in 2011, compared with not featuring at all and tenth respectively in 2010.

Regulatory compliance has moved centre stage not only as a top priority for CIOs, but also a major headache. Some 70% of CIOs said that they had experienced an increase in regulatory requirements, while around two thirds anticipated a further increase in 2012.

Highlighting the increased importance of compliance, in 2010 68% of participants expected their regulatory workload to increase over the following 12 months. This has been borne out with 70% of CIOs reporting an increase in regulatory requirements, with nearly two thirds anticipating a further increase in 2012.

Of particular significance is that now over 50%, compared to just 29% in 2010, of IT departments are struggling to meet these reporting requirements and deadlines. The main issues causing problems are the manual overheads of reporting and the associated cost of compliance. This clearly highlights the need for great instrumentation and automation when it comes to meeting compliance requirements.

 For more detail and analysis from this report see the November edition of ComputerScope, available 11 November 2011.

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