Gartner CIO priorities: What has changed in the last 15 years
The evolution of CIO priorities over 15 years
Gartner has been publishing CIO technology priorities (via CIO surveys) for several years.
Here is a tracker of how the priorities have evolved over 15 years.
Gartner CIO priorities 2007-2016 - Check out my my analysis in 2016
2021 - Top tech priorities (Gartner)
So, what has changed?
Security is and has always been the holy grail. 15 years of sustained prioritisation has not helped or seems inadequate
CIOs claim that they have prioritised and invested in BI and data analytics as one of their top 5 priorities since 2007, but even today the biggest challenges in every organisation are data silos and timely data sharing
Cloud technologies (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) has enjoyed consistent investment and prioritisation and it is quite visible too - Kudos to Product Managers and Product Marketers at the Cloud hyper scalers
While it may seem that ERP and CRM have moved out of the top 10, I believe they have taken a new avatar in the form of “Cloud services and solutions”
Networks, communication and connectivity are now commodity. Not only they are out of top 10, but they are at 18/20 in the list
“Collaboration technologies” was broadly Virtualisation, Sharepoint, Internal portals, Skype/Webex - Thanks to COVID they have taken a re-birth in the form of “Digital Workplace”. They will rule the roost for another 5 years till we settle the remote-hybrid-onsite workplace debate
Software development & upgrades is an interesting addition to top 10. Two key trends driving this are (1) it is now cheaper to build and maintain bespoke software (2) purpose built software gives organisations the competitive edge when it comes to running efficient core business processes
Customer / User experience is the new trend in town. While we should always have focused on human centric design, it is amazing how we as an industry are acting as if we just discovered it! UI/UX is here to stay as a priority area at least for the next 5 years till we transform the existing business applications from something that only business users can use to something that millennials can use
Process Automation is quite a narrow view of the world and is only a top priority because the marketing teams of the RPA companies have done a terrific job. We should see this trend to evolve in the next few years into a holistic intelligent automation priority (which is inclusive of cognitive computing etc.)
Finally the CIOs are starting to focus beyond tin, in 2021, Infrastructure and Data Center has moved out of the top 10.
Please feel free to share your observations…