Gartner Looks at the Big IT Issues for the Next Few Years

February 11, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The predictions for the IT market were a little light as 2007 came to a close, but the analysts at Gartner talked to 1,500 chief information officers and other top IT brass and as part of its promotion for its Gartner EXP executive program, where CIOs get to hobnob, the company released some of the results of the surveys. The 1,500 CIOs surveyed represented $132 billion in aggregate IT spending in 33 countries and across 23 different industries.

Right up front, 85 percent of the CIOs polled said that they expected “significant change” in their IT organizations over the next three years, which is saying quite a lot considering the tectonic shifts that have hit the data center in the past decade. And, as has been the case in the past couple of years, CIOs are not being given a lot of extra dough to get new things done and to keep old systems updated and running. Among the companies surveyed by Gartner as 2007 was ending, the aggregate IT budgets of these firms was expected to grow by an average of 3.3 percent, up a smidgen compared to 2007 but certainly not qualifying as a boom in IT spending.

And once again, the priorities of business managers and IT managers show a classic mismatch, and demonstrate how business and IT talk in different languages and have different goals as each year gets under way. Take a look at the top 10 business and IT priorities for 2008 according to the Garter survey:

Top 10 Business Priorities	Rank	Top 10 Technology Priorities	Rank
Business process improvement	1	Business intelligence applications	1
Attracting and retaining new customers	2	Enterprise applications (ERP, CRM and others)	2
Creating new products and services (innovation)	3	Servers and storage technologies	3
Expanding into new markets or geographies	4	Legacy modernization, upgrade or enhancement	4
Reducing enterprise costs	5	Technical infrastructure	5
Improving enterprise workforce effectiveness	6	Security technologies	6
Expanding current customer relationships	7	Networking, voice and data	7
Increasing the use of information and analytics	8	Collaboration technologies	8
Targeting customers and markets more effectively	9	Document management	9
Acquiring new companies and capabilities (mergers and acquisitions)	10	Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and service-oriented business applications (SOBA)	10

“CIOs recognize the importance of IT in ‘making the difference’ by changing business processes, attracting customers and developing new products and services,” explained Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP and one of the authors of a report based on the survey results, called Making the Difference: The 2008 CIO Agenda. “However, they are guarded in their confidence in IT’s ability to create results in these areas. Momentum has been building for IT to play a larger role. This year, those expectations are beginning to outpace CIO confidence to deliver. This sharpens CIOs’ concentration on IT capabilities like never before.”

Of course, being sharp is not as useful as being properly staffed with IT experts who can get IT jobs done. Only 27 percent of the CIOs polled by Gartner say they have the correct number of skilled IT personnel to take on the challenges they face in 2008.

In another Gartner report, the company’s prognosticators were in a mood to make some predictions–more than 100 in all made collectively by the analysts at the company. To try to stir up a little business, Gartner gave a little taste of those predictions, which span from 2008 through 2012. Here are the ones that affect real IT operations:

By 2009, more than a third of IT organizations will have some kind of environmental criteria as part of their top buying criteria. Basically, green will become an important aspect of the IT buying cycle.
By 2010, 75 percent of IT organizations will look at the full environmental impact of the PCs they buy–including energy consumption and carbon dioxide footprint–and will make buying decisions based on which PCs do the least damage.
By 2010, end user preferences will decide up to half of all hardware, software, and services acquisitions made by the IT department. About time, really. Home computing has been more sophisticated than office computing for a while–like 15 years.
By 2011, early adopters of the idea of buying IT infrastructure as a service will commit 40 percent of their infrastructure budgets to what is essentially renting hardware, either through utilities, cloud computing, or other non-traditional outsourcing approaches.
By 2012, 80 percent of commercial software will have some open source components.
By 2012, at least a third of spending on application software among businesses will be done through a subscription-based service instead of licensing software for a company’s own gear.

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