CIOs At Risk of Becoming Irrelevant on Technology Decisions, Logicalis Survey Says
January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie
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A survey conducted last year by Logicails indicates that CIOs are losing clout in the board room when it comes to technology decisions. Unless they do something, CIOs and other tech leaders risk being overshadowed by line of business managers. According to the survey conducted by the managed service provider (MSP), 60 percent of CIOs agree that line-of-business managers will gain sway on technology purchases over the next three to five years. It’s an ongoing issue facing technology leaders and is being driven in large part by the consumerization of technology and the availability of increasingly sophisticated Web-based services. To respond to this trend, CIOs need to engage themselves with more strategic activities, which is something that nearly three quarters of CIOs and IT directors want to spend at least half of their time on. The gap between that desire and reality, however, is quite large. According to Logicalis’ survey, more than half of CIOs and IT directors spend more than 70 percent of their time on the day-to-day management of technology, while 80 percent spend at least half of their time on low-value, non-strategic activities. “These findings confirm the reality we see on the ground,” Logicalis Group CEO Ian Cook says in a press release. “IT leadership is now actively looking for a services-led transformation strategy that will re-align from a technology-defined function to one that is services-defined.” Becoming more strategic is a great goal, but how does one get there from here? Simply outsourcing “legacy” systems to an MSP may be part of the picture, but it can’t get you all the way there. This is borne out by the fact that only 30 percent of CIOs surveyed want to hand day-to-day management of IT systems over to MSPs. Instead, CIOs should become more involved with the evolution of IT in their organizations. “Enterprise IT groups cannot afford any longer to be just watching, studying, exploring, or experimenting with cloud services, mobile devices, social technologies, or the other core elements of what we call the third platform,” says Chris Barnard, associate vice president at IDC. “They must develop deep competence in all of these technologies, often with the help of third parties with expertise in ‘as-a-service’ strategies.”
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